Thieves, Liars and Mountaineers: On the 8000 Metre Peak Circus in Pakistan's Karakoram Mountains (11 page)

Today is one of the worst days we've had yet. Although there's little snow, conditions at Base Camp are cold, overcast and windy all day. It's a day to sit inside your tent and do little else. The mountains all around us are invisible through a shroud of damp white mist. Two Polish and one German climber walk past our dining tent as we're having breakfast, having just returned from Camp 1. They say there was half a metre of snow overnight at Camp 1, although the German indicates a line on his leg level with the top of his boot.

The gloom is partially alleviated in the middle of the afternoon when Gorgan rouses us all from our tents with the promise of tea and chocolate cake in the dining tent to celebrate Bastille Day. True to form, the Portuguese couple, Paulo and Daniela, who are climbing Gasherbrum VI, happen to be passing our campsite at the time and have positioned themselves right in front of the cake. They certainly seem to have a gift for networking, but they're quite personable people, and nobody seems to mind.

“What is this for?” asks Tarke, arriving a little late when there are just two pieces of cake left.

You can't expect a Nepali to be familiar with French history, so I enlighten him. “Gorgan has asked Ashad to cook the cake to celebrate cutting off the head of his king.”

I'm still disappointed with the difficulties I had on the Banana Ridge, and concerned that I became part of the problem. Phil is bullish in defence. He insists I wouldn't have fallen off the mountain when I slipped, saying I would have arrested myself had the fixed ropes not been there, although I know I would have found it extremely difficult to traverse the face back onto the ridge without falling again.

“We've all fallen before,” he says. “It builds up your confidence and is part of the learning process.”

I'm concerned that while lots of people had problems with their crampons balling up, I seemed to have more trouble than most people facing outwards and standing up.

“You need to dig in with your heels rather than your toes,” says Phil.

“And why no ice axe,” I ask.

“So you can hold onto the rope with both hands rather than just one,” he replies.

“And one other thing. Why was nobody using a safety prussic on the fixed rope? That would've arrested my fall straight away and stopped me doing that embarrassing pendulum swing across the face.”

“One extra thing to worry about,” says Phil.

I finish the conversation with my confidence buoyed up a little, and looking forward to tackling the Banana Ridge again, but I really hope I don't have to descend it in a blizzard with those horrible powdery snow conditions for a third time.

More information is filtering through to us about the deaths on Nanga Parbat, though much of it is still hearsay. It seems the Korean woman, Go Mi-Sun, died on descent from the summit from a fall in jetstream winds, but it now seems there may have been more controversial circumstances surrounding the accident.

“There's trouble on Nanga Parbat,” Phil says, emerging from his tent. “It looks like the Austrian team pulled the ropes on the way down.”

“That's outrageous,” I reply.

But it seems Phil has more sympathy with the Austrians. “I'm fed up with the Koreans. F--- ‘em!” he says. “They're the only team here who've contributed nothing to the fixed ropes.”

It's true that both our team Altitude Junkies, and the Jagged Globe team, who between us have been doing almost all the rope fixing on Gasherbrum, have given the other teams plenty of warning that we'll pull the ropes down after we've finished with them unless other teams are prepared to contribute with equipment or financially. Everybody at Base Camp has chipped in apart from the Korean team who have been waiting, coincidentally, for the very same Miss Go who died on Nanga Parbat to arrive and make a decision as their expedition leader. It's possible that the Austrian team gave the same warning on Nanga Parbat, but it wasn't heeded by the Koreans, who climbed the fixed ropes anyway without having contributed, but this is speculation on our part. Even if it turns out to be true, pulling the ropes down while there are still climbers above who may be relying on them for descent, is knowingly putting lives at extreme risk.

“I fell three times descending the Banana Ridge the other day,” I reply. “If somebody had removed the fixed ropes while I was still at Camp 2, I'd be dead.”

“Dude, you would've arrested yourself before you'd fallen off the face,” says Phil. “You might've shat yourself, but you wouldn't have died. There's nothing wrong with that. I've shat myself on a mountain many times before.”

“You shat yourself on the way up,” I point out.

“Yeah, but that was because I was ill, not through fear,” says Phil.

As the conversation evolves from the serious to the banal and we move onto a discussion about the occasions Phil got caught short on mountains, I sense the moment has gone, but this has highlighted an age old problem with commercial mountaineering peaks for which this latest incident is a variant on a common theme. In the days when difficult mountains were only climbed by experienced climbers prepared to take their own risks, things were much simpler. But when a number of climbers of differing levels of experience, and accepting differing levels of risk, particularly in terms of safety precautions, are on a mountain together, who is responsible when things go wrong? And should people be competent enough to be able to descend when the safety precautions aren't there? If the answer to this is yes then I, for one, should not be climbing Gasherbrum. The tragedy on K2 on August 1 st last year, when 11 climbers died on a single day, was caused in part because inexperienced climbers were unable to descend safely after a serac collapsed and swept the fixed ropes away.

There's also the unavoidable issue of a handful of people attempting dangerous feats which are patently beyond their abilities. Only a handful of elite mountaineers have ever succeeded in climbing all fourteen 8000 metre peaks, and many others have died trying. But this does not seem to have deterred a number of lesser climbers – those like me who need fixed ropes for the hard bits – from trying to tick off all the 8000 metre peaks themselves. A number of these peaks, such as K2, Kangchenjunga, Dhaulagiri, Annapurna and Nanga Parbat, can accurately be termed “suicide mountains”, where campsites and routes between campsites are flush with objective danger such that climbing them becomes a game of Russian Roulette. Callous as it may sound, I find it much harder to summon up sympathy for climbers who meet their end in these circumstances, knowing the risks, yet ignoring them for the hope of a greater glory, and disregarding the high probability that other climbers may have to risk their lives trying to save them when things go wrong.

Whatever the answers to these difficult questions, our Sherpa team is pleased to discover the Korean team has now quit Base Camp and left behind a fresh bag of chillies.

A second day of good weather down at Base Camp, and I take the opportunity to re-pitch my tent. As one might expect when there is a river of shifting ice just a few inches below, my tent has been subject to considerable movement during the month since we've been here, but the effect has been most unexpected. It would not have surprised me if there had been some subsidence in the middle of the tent where my warm body had melted the ice underneath, but in fact the reverse has happened and the whole tent has risen up on a mushroom of ice. Unfortunately this pedestal is smaller than the base of the tent, so it's as though I'm sleeping on top of a small mound whose summit is in the middle of the floor. Towards the edges of the tent the floor falls away suddenly, producing a deep crack all the way round the perimeter of the tent where all my possessions accumulate. In reality, the sun is melting the glacier around the tent more quickly than the ice underneath it because it's not getting as much shade.

I re-pitch my tent in a dip, knowing now what I didn't before – that the tent will eventually rise up on a new platform rather than sink further into the dip. Now that I'm no longer perched on a bump in the middle of the tent, it's much more comfortable, and I'm no longer as close to the ceiling, so the tent interior feels like a high-roofed cathedral in comparison to what it was. I look back at the old wrinkled platform I'd been sleeping on in amazement, and wonder how I managed to get any sleep at all. When I first pitched the tent a month ago it was a flat area of gravel in a slight dip, but now it's a veritable jagged hillside riven with cracks. I'm no longer looking out across the icefall where I used to see little black silhouettes in the distance on their way up to Camp 1, as I've rotated my tent to face Baltoro Kangri, but it feels more peaceful down in the secluded hollow that I've chosen.

Gasherbrum I from my tent at Base Camp

When the sky is clear, as it is tonight, the period immediately after dinner at 8pm is a magical time. As the sun disappears behind the mountains at Concordia, most of the valley is in shadow, but the crowning glory of Base Camp – the huge summit pyramid of Gasherbrum I with its smooth wall of snow fringed by rock borders – remains lit up like a giant floodlit edifice. Across the Abruzzi Glacier the broad dome of Baltoro Kangri remains bathed in a purple glow, and the darkened form of Chogolisa has a sliver of orange light dappling its northern flank. This heavenly light show performs for us perhaps every three nights or so, and it's definitely the most memorable thing I've ever brushed my teeth to.

More bizarrely, Gorgan, Arian and Michael have decided that me brushing my teeth is a form of entertainment for them. Every evening as I scrub away on the raised moraine outside my tent, they line up outside the dining tent and watch. Weird.

The third successive clear day at Base Camp. We're all getting restless at the delays, but everyone who has tried to get above Camp 1 over the last few days has been driven back by the wind. Although it looks calm down here, appearances are deceptive. Still, at least the snow will have had time to consolidate. We're now talking about heading back up the mountain on Sunday or Monday in the hope the wind may have dropped by the time we get up there.

This morning I walk for about an hour up the moraine to get that one picture of Gasherbrum II from the Abruzzi Glacier while the sky is clear. Although it takes around two hours of walking to get a single photo, it will hopefully have been worth it, and let's face it, I've got bugger all else to do today.

In the afternoon we have another marathon game of cards. I'm now concerned that I'm going to run out of books before the end of the expedition. I haven't brought along enough books to satisfy me for two months because I'd been hoping to swap with people, but apart from a copy of Bill Bryson's
Notes from a Small Island
, nobody's brought anything to read apart from trashy thrillers that I absolutely hate. Things have got so bad that I've ended up reading Dan Brown's
Angels and Demons
, about a ludicrous plot to blow up the Vatican, a book I would otherwise never have read in a million years. And do I feel enlightened for having done so? Do I b---ocks.

Up at the crack of dawn, 5am, to bid goodbye to Ian and Philippe, whose expeditions are over and who walk out today with the German Amical group. We have breakfast in the cold and dark – Arian is far too cheerful for that time of the morning – but by 6am their porters have still not turned up, so I wish them a safe journey and go back to bed. Ian needs to go back early to sail in a yacht race. Gasherbrum was his second attempt at an 8000 metre peak. On Manaslu last year he also got no higher than Camp 2 before having to leave due to other commitments. After he left the weather immediately improved, and those who stayed behind reached the summit a week later. What are the chances of that happening here? Philippe on the other hand has already climbed Everest and completed the Seven Summits. His aim this time was to climb Gasherbrum I, Gasherbrum II and Broad Peak, and now there's no longer time to climb all three he feels he's failed – a strange logic, I feel – so he's going back without having climbed any of them.

Philippe looks up at the Gasherbrums

Shortly before lunchtime a rumour reaches us that the Jagged Globe group, who are leaving tomorrow, have some books they wish to leave behind. Excited, I walk over to their camp with Gorgan, only to be given five more trashy thrillers and an autobiography of Jeremy Clarkson, the whingeing automotive journalist. I've now finished
Angels and Demons
and have moved on to reading
Patriot Games
by Tom Clancy. Lord give me strength. It's certainly better than
Angels and Demons
, but towards the end it descends into a lengthy siege involving a bunch of gun-crazy American servicemen saving the Prince of Wales,
our
Prince of Wales I should say, from the IRA, one of whom ends up lecturing the poor prince on the best policy to appease the terrorist threat. The book was written in the 1980s, and I can't help reflecting on the irony of it all. God bless America. I've only brought seven books with me, and had hoped somebody in Base Camp would bring something else worth reading, but so far nothing. On the other hand, apart from discussions about the weather forecast and the possibility of our next summit push, the most common topic of conversation in the dining tent appears to be masturbation, so perhaps I shouldn't be too surprised about the quality of reading material.