Finding British mountaineers willing to commit the time necessary for an 8000m expedition became difficult. On my final 8000m climbs I was joined by one of my Nepalese friends, Pasang Gelu, a great character with the kind of relaxed personality that is essential for coping with the strains of extreme altitude. Pasang had a genuine desire to climb big Himalayan peaks, was easy to get along with and we made a good team.
Climbing is a way of life for me; I am addicted. If you were to cut me in half, you would find ‘mountain climber’ written all the way through. I love being in the hills and the biggest hills of the Himalaya and Karakoram, being the most dangerous, offer the greatest challenge. But I do not climb to die. I climb to live – and climbing enhances my life.
Over my 18-year quest to climb the 8000m peaks, I have always stuck to my motto: ‘No mountain is worth a life, coming back is a success and the summit is only a bonus.’
Early morning, setting off from the Shoulder at over 8000m on K2. A Dutch climber follows me up towards the Bottleneck.
A Twin Otter and a Russian Mi-17 heli at Lukla airstrip, the start of the Everest and Lhotse Base Camp treks through Nepal’s Khumbu region. It is an exciting landing and take-off; the airstrip is not much bigger than an aircraft carrier, perched on the mountainside.
1 SHISHA PANGMA
8046m, 1987
Snow was melting in a small pan over a mini gas burner. Steve Untch, my 6'5" American climbing mate, was doing his best to relax, despite being crammed into the little space remaining in our tiny bivvy tent. Close by in another tent, Jerzy ‘Jurek’ Kukuczka and Artur ‘Słon’ Hajzer were also brewing up. We were at around 6500m on Shisha Pangma and the purring stoves and steaming water heralded refreshment. I was in my element and where I wanted to be, in the Himalaya on an 8000m peak. As I contemplated the warm mug of tea, all thought of danger was washed to the back of my mind.
Abruptly, I was snapped out of this blissful reverie by an ominous, alarmingly loud thud and portentous rumble. Suddenly it was ‘action stations’. There was a great cacophony of yelling in both English and Polish, and I heard Artur and Jurek screaming, ‘Avalanche! Run! Get Out! Avalanche! Come On! Avalanche!’
I pushed the stove out of the door and the precious water spilled over the snowy ground as I frantically yanked my boots on.
In the ensuing chaotic melée I felt Steve clambering over me as he desperately tried to squeeze his huge body out of the constriction of the tent door at the same time as Jurek was gallantly trying to drag me out. It would have been comical if it had not been so terrifyingly serious. It felt like being ambushed and having to scramble and dive for cover, yet in a jubilant, mock-heroic way I was enjoying the drama. Gasping in the icy cold thin air, we tumbled down the easy-angled snow slope below the tent as the soft slab avalanche slithered down towards us.
Fortunately the avalanche ground to a halt before reaching our tents and we literally gulped sighs of relief in the rarefied air; it had been a near miss. When we had all recovered enough to stop blaspheming, I thanked Jurek for his selfless bravery in helping me out of my tent when he could have scurried away. It was a brutal baptism and a great revelation. I now clearly understood that I was not just out for a jolly jaunt with the mountaineering legend Jerzy Kukuczka. Escaping the avalanche heightened my senses and reminded me that I was in a highly hazardous, unforgiving environment. I learned a lot about how to stay alive in the Himalaya on this expedition, especially from Jurek and Artur, and it was to stand me in good stead on many future trips. Ironically, and to my great sadness, Jurek was killed only two years later on the South Face of Lhotse.
The North Face of Shisha Pangma, from the Tibetan Plateau at 4500m. My new route in 1987 took the central gully line, slanting right-to-left up the face, to the notch in the ridge before the prominent central summit.
We had travelled out to Tibet – a mystical, elusive country – and Shisha Pangma seemed an obscure and enigmatic mountain. I was part of a post-monsoon Polish international expedition, organised by the Katowice Mountain Club. I had effectively served an ‘apprenticeship’ climbing and learning how to survive on 5000m and 6000m peaks in both the Andes and the Himalaya and was now embarking on an adventure to tackle this giant peak with some of the best high-altitude mountaineers in the world. The audacious plan was to attempt two 8000m peaks in succession – first a new route on Shisha Pangma and then the unclimbed South Face of Lhotse, a technical, steep Himalayan ‘big wall’.
We left Kathmandu in late August and headed up the Friendship Highway to Tibet, in the People’s Republic of China. As well as Jurek and Artur, other team members included Wanda Rutkiewicz (Poland), Christine de Colombel (France), Ramiro Navarette (Ecuador), Carlos Carsolio (Mexico) and my climbing partner Steve Untch.
Mud and rockslides caused by monsoon rains blocked the road in many places, and we had to walk most of the way to the Nepal–Tibet border. It was very hot and humid so we often stopped to cool off in the many waterfalls and plunge pools along the way. We soon lost our inhibitions and got to know each other fairly well. The French female contingent fearlessly led the skinny-dipping, rapidly followed by the British and US contingent (Steve and myself). As you would.
Crossing the border from Kodari in Nepal to Zhangmu in Tibet was a curious experience but uneventful. We lodged in the so-called best hotel in town, a scruffy concrete multi-storey building. The TVs did not work and the en suite bathrooms in each bedroom were not plumbed in. Instead there was a squalid porcelain-tiled communal toilet room with a slit in the floor and a big stick to poke the solids down. There was no dining room in the hotel but further up the street a ‘restaurant’ perched on the edge of the Bhote Khosi gorge served palatable food and excellent bottled Chinese beer. To our amazement, after each course most of the plates, the left-over food and all the empty bottles were thrown out of the window into the gorge. Looking down we could see a huge pile of broken bottles and rubbish.
We travelled by Land Cruiser to a roadhead base camp at 5000m, stopping at villages such as Nyalam for a few days’ acclimatisation en route. The Tibetan Plateau was a complete contrast to the hot, humid Nepalese lowlands. Here it was clear, bright, sunny weather and sunburn was a problem, although the nights were icy cold. We hired yaks to take us up to 5900m and the nomadic yak herders arrived to meet us as if by magic, emerging from the barren Tibetan wilderness. Exuding an aroma of smoky yak excrement tinged with rancid yak butter, they certainly looked like proper Tibetans, with jet-black, shiny, plaited hair; most of them were dressed in woollen felt and animal-skin clothes and bootees. To us they were wild-looking characters, but to them we climbers in our modern fleece and Gore-Tex kit must have seemed like peculiar aliens. Unfortunately they also took a fancy to some of our stuff and we had to guard all our kit and supplies carefully.
Jerzy Kukuczka meets nomadic yak herders on the Tibetan Plateau while en route to Shisha Pangma in 1987.
Yak herders’ tent in Tibet with Shisha Pangma behind.
Jurek and Artur planned to climb together, attempting a new route, the traverse of the skyline ridge of Shisha Pangma. Steve and I also had our sights on a new route, lightweight and Alpine-style, just the two of us. We had noticed the obvious diagonal ramp line and couloir running right to left up the North Face, starting from a high altitude basin-like glacial valley at 6900m. Wanda later told me that Reinhold Messner had wanted to climb this line in May 1981 but backed off because of deep monsoon