The Beckoning Silence (9 page)

I had met Anatoli Boukreev briefly at the Banff Film Festival in Canada in November 1997. To my mind Anatoli was one of the world’s greatest climbers. His list of ascents was impressive. He had climbed eleven of the world’s fourteen 8000-metre peaks without oxygen and had summitted Everest three times. Indeed he had summitted solo on many of the world’s highest peaks, in less than a day, in winter and always without oxygen.

His part in saving three stranded climbers in a storm on Everest in 1996 that was to claim eight lives was one of the most astounding rescues in mountaineering history. Not only did he perform the rescue single-handed in the dark of a storm-swept night on the South Col, but he had only recently climbed Everest without oxygen. Yet of all the guides and clients sheltering in tents on the South Col at the time, he was the only man strong enough, or willing enough, to attempt the rescue.

Although Jon Krakauer’s exceptional book about the Everest tragedy
Into Thin Air
referred to Boukreev’s strength and past achievements, he seemed to play down Boukreev’s efforts. Indeed he was roundly critical of some of Boukreev’s actions during that day and the consequent storm-blasted night. Somehow he overlooked his own relative inexperience at high altitude as compared to Boukreev’s phenomenal record of ascents. I never did comprehend how someone, quite understandably exhausted by his own oxygen-assisted ascent of the mountain, could sleep through the events of that night and then later write critically of Boukreev. Boukreev made repeated solo forays into the teeth of a blizzard to rescue three climbers who otherwise would certainly have died in the stormy darkness at 26,000 feet. I admire Jon Krakauer hugely, both as a climber and a highly talented writer, but I felt his treatment of Boukreev did him no credit whatsoever.

It was a great honour for me when Anatoli signed my copy of
The Climb
– ‘Joe, enjoy the life and mountains’. He asked about Simon Yates, my climbing partner on Siula Grande in 1985. Simon had worked as a guide with Anatoli and they were firm friends. It seemed a small world. Less than eight weeks later, on Christmas Day, Anatoli died in an avalanche on the south face of Annapurna I.

Ray Delaney and I were drinking beers in P.K.’s lodge in Namche Bazaar when a familiar-looking American offered some friendly advice about potential areas for exploration. We had chatted briefly and inconsequentially and it was only later as Ray and I had set off down the valley towards Phakding that I realised that we had been speaking to Alex Lowe. Ray wasn’t convinced and we bickered about this as we headed down the switch-backs below Namche. I regretted not having spoken to Alex for longer. Without doubt he was one of the driving forces of American climbing, a spirit that inspired my generation. He was one of the world’s most exceptional climbers. His list of ascents and the standards of technical skill he displayed on both rock and ice was extraordinary.

On 5 October 1999 Alex Lowe, David Bridges and Conrad Anker were on a quick training hike up towards the foot of their intended route on the south face of Shishapangma, an 8000-metre peak in the Tibetan Himalaya. It was supposed to be a rest day and they had set out for some exercise to get the blood circulating and the muscles working hard.

I had met Conrad at the same Banff festival in 1997 where I had encountered Anatoli Boukreev. He struck me as a friendly and approachable man and I was impressed with his relaxed attitude to life and climbing which belied the incredible drive and talent which enabled him to climb some of the world’s hardest and most formidable routes.

An hour after the party had left their advance base camp a huge area of wind-slab snow broke loose from the col between Shishapangma and the peak of Punga Ri 6000 feet above them. Within thirty seconds it had billowed into one of those lethally massive avalanches often seen in the Himalayas. Instinct took over and the three men ran for their lives. Alex Lowe and David Bridges ran down the slope of the low-angle glacier beneath the south face and Conrad, without consciously deciding to do so, ran across it. All three men were caught in the avalanche and Conrad was lucky to be bundled 70 feet down the slope before being ejected. But Alex and David disappeared. As he desperately searched for his friends, knowing the hope of finding them was waning with each passing minute, Conrad slowly realised that they were gone for ever. He later wrote:

[l]I knew they were buried yet it felt to me as if they had vanished into the sky, lifted by a force far greater than humans and carried to a place we can only imagine.

[a]Alex Lowe had been a close friend and a mentor to Conrad for almost a decade and it must have been a shattering blow to lose him so violently and so instantly. In a moving tribute published in
Climbing
magazine Conrad celebrated Alex Lowe’s life and tried to find some meaning in this stark and brutal loss.

[l]The old questions we ask ourselves about climbing took on new meaning. We knew the risk. Should we have done something different? Are the risks we take worth the rewards they bring? What drives us to climb? The exploration of the unknown has led humanity to where we are today. The quest for knowledge, the willingness to accept risk for an unknown outcome, has allowed people to progress spiritually and intellectually. The thrill of discovering new reaches remains with many of us, in all walks of life. Those of us who found this calling and pursue it in the mountains are fortunate. For Alex this is what climbing was about, the exploration of the soul, the trust and learning gained from attempting something difficult and improbable.

[a]  For me this had always been the essence of climbing but something had now changed within me, making it harder to accept the inevitability of such random risks. Some people may regard me as a highly experienced climber since I have climbed all over the world and completed difficult technical first ascents, but set against the climbing standards that Anatoli and Alex had achieved I was a complete beginner. That they could vanish so easily was hard to grasp. Alex Lowe had written a dispatch to the MountainZone website prior to the avalanche:

[l]Thinking back … I appreciate why I come to the mountains; not to conquer them but to immerse myself in their incomprehensible immensity – so much bigger than we are; to better comprehend humility and patience balanced in harmony, with the desire to push hard; to share what the hills offer and to share it in the long term with good friends and ultimately with my own sons.

[a]  There is something about mountains that moves the soul. They arouse a powerful sense of spiritual awareness and a notion of our own transient and fragile mortality and our insignificant place in the universe. They have about them an ethereal, evocative addiction that I find impossible to resist. They are an infuriating and fascinating contradiction. Climbing rarely makes sense but nearly always feels right. As Syd Marty, the Canadian mountain poet, wrote in his poem
Abbot
,

Men fall off mountains because

they have no business being there

That’s why they go, that’s why they die

[a]It made a strangely beautiful sort of sense to me. I almost understand it but it fades quickly. Like the thread that makes the cloth I can never tease it all out without it unravelling and losing the deeper meaning. It can only be lived.

I had scarcely known Chantal, Anatoli and Alex but it was distressing to see how these superb mountaineers could be wiped out so casually. Their talent could not save them. If they could die so easily what were the chances for me? If it came down to probability then the odds were exactly the same and that perhaps was even more disturbing.

I struggled back from the bar clutching four pints of bitter, easing my way tentatively through the throng of customers. Richard, John and Les were still enthusing about paragliding.

‘Are you still banging on about it?’ I asked, as I passed the pints around.

‘Yeah, well you should get back into it,’ John said.

‘Actually, I was coming round to thinking that myself.’

‘You wouldn’t believe how it’s changed,’ Richard Haszko added. ‘Totally different sport now.’

‘But at what risk?’

‘Just think of what we flew with in the old days,’ John added. ‘We had no harnesses, just glorified webbing bra straps. Our idea of a harness was to clip a wooden plank to our risers and sit on it.’ He laughed at the memory.

‘And now we have air bags, kevlar plates, pre-formed foam padding, the lot. We even have reserve parachutes in case of an irrecoverable collapse,’ Richard added.

‘And think of the gadgets. All those toys for boys,’ John said excitedly. ‘You can get really good radios, and variometers telling us our sink and rise rate, global positioning satellite systems, wind and ground speed indicators. We have multiple riser systems and speed bars. We can pull Big Ears, and B-line stalls to get out of trouble …’

‘OK, OK.’ I was getting confused.

‘You should give it a go,’ Richard prompted.

‘I don’t know,’ I muttered hesitantly. ‘I’ll have to re-take my pilot examinations. It would take ages.’

‘No it wouldn’t,’ John said. ‘You flew a lot before. It will come back really quickly, won’t it Richard?’

‘Sure.’ As a qualified instructor Richard knew what he was talking about. ‘You’ll have to mug up a bit on some of the technical questions in the written exam but I’m sure you’ll pass.’

Within a few months I had re-taken my pilot exams after flying a refresher course with Roger Shaw of Peak Paragliding. I was pleased to find that I had forgotten very little of my flying skills and had been enviously eyeing up the baffling variety of wings and harnesses now available on the market.

I ordered a canopy and during August and October I waited impatiently for it to arrive and tried to ignore my heavily damaged bank balance. A good harness with an air bag back protector, an emergency reserve parachute, radio, variometer, helmet and flying suit had not left me with much change out of £4000 and the long wait made me wonder whether it would be worth it.

In the third week of October it finally arrived and I spent days reading manuals and trying to familiarise myself with the bewildering number of adjustment straps, speed bar connections and sitting positions of the harness. It required hours of testing in the garage hanging in the harness from a beam trying to get everything to feel right. Given that I had no idea how it should feel, this was a tricky operation. Trying to understand the manual for the radio proved completely beyond me and the variometer had me equally baffled. I would have to find someone on the hill who might be able to set me right on their use.

The good flying weather of the summer had long gone and the cold gusty conditions of the autumn meant that I had a long wait. I had no intention of starting my first flight on a new wing in anything other than benign conditions.

4 Given wings to fly

I was at my desk sorting through a confused jumble of photographs and boxes of slides when the phone rang.

‘Joe? It’s John.’

‘Hi, John. How’s tricks?’

‘Bad news,’ he said, sounding sombre. It was a phrase I had heard all too often and at the tone of his voice my heart sank. Immediately I was trying to think who we knew who was away on climbing expeditions.
Tom Richardson? No. He’s just got back. Anyway it’s mid-October, everyone is at home right now.

‘How bad?’ I asked warily.

‘It’s Tat,’ John said in a strained voice. ‘He’s dead.’

‘Tat? Dead?’ I couldn’t understand it.
He wasn’t climbing, maybe a car accident?

‘I’ve just heard from Peter Franks,’ John continued. ‘Geoff Birtles heard something on the radio so I rang Peter on his mobile. He’s come off the hill and now he’s at the police station giving a statement.’

‘Peter Franks? The pilot?’

‘Yes, he was on the hill when it happened.’

‘What hill?’

‘In Greece,’ John said and I remembered Tat and Peter had gone to Greece the previous Saturday for a one-week paragliding holiday at Tolo in the Peloponnese, south of Athens.

‘They were flying on a site called Jesus,’ John added. It meant nothing to me. I couldn’t think clearly and stared numbly at the boxes of slides on my desk. There was one marked ‘Bolivia – Tat’. I looked at it blankly.
Not Tat. Please, please tell me it’s not Tat.

‘Joe, are you there?’

‘What? Yes … sorry John, I was just wondering … I mean, are you sure it’s Tat?’ I pleaded hopelessly. ‘Maybe you heard wrong …’

‘No, it is Tat. I’ve just talked to Peter. He saw it happen. He’s gone, Joe. Tat’s gone.’ There was a catch in his voice. I could sense the tears, the disbelief, the incredulous grief.

‘What happened?’ I whispered, hardly wishing to hear it.

‘Oh, God, I don’t know. We can’t understand it …’

‘Did he have a big collapse?’ I asked, thinking that Tat might have been caught in strong turbulence when the air comes vertically down onto the top of the wing, collapsing it completely. If he had been close to the ground he would have had no chance to re-inflate the wing in time.

‘No, he didn’t seem to do anything wrong,’ John replied. ‘Peter said they took off together only about three hours ago. Jesus. They’ve carried him off the hill. They wrapped him in his wing …’ I heard John hesitate as he struggled to come to terms with the awful facts. Although he knew them to be true the shocked incredulity in his words was from a man desperately trying not to believe them. He breathed in deeply, gathering himself.

‘Peter took off and tracked to the right along the ridge. Tat went left. When Peter looked back he saw that Tat had found good lift and had climbed nearly 600 feet. Peter turned back towards Tat to try and join him in the climb and then he saw Tat’s wing go into some sort of collapse that induced a fast spin. He didn’t seem to do anything to stop the spin. It doesn’t make sense.’