E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten
Scott / MacIntyre Shishapangma
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-910240-06-9
Verlag: Vertebrate Digital
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The alpine-style first ascent of the South-West Face
E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-910240-06-9
Verlag: Vertebrate Digital
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Born to a lower-middle-class family in Nottingham in 1941, Doug Scott began climbing in Derbyshire when he was thirteen and without any obvious plan in it was soon discovering the cliffs of Snowdonia, Scotland, the Alps and the Dolomites. He completed his first Alpine season at the age of eighteen. In 1965, aged twenty-three, he went on his first organised expedition, to the Tibesti Mountains of Chad. It was to be the first of many trips to the high mountains of the world. On 24 September 1975, he and his climbing partner Dougal Haston became the first Britons to reach the summit of Mount Everest and they became national heroes. In total, Scott has made forty-two expeditions to the high mountains of Asia, reaching the summits of forty peaks. With the exception of his ascent of Everest, he has made all his climbs in lightweight or alpine style and without the use of supplementary oxygen. Scott was made a CBE in 1984. He is former president of the Alpine Club, and in 1999 he received the Royal Geographical Society Patron's Gold Medal. In 2011 he was awarded the Piolets d'Or Lifetime Achievement award, during the presentation of which his mountaineering style was described as 'visionary'. In 1995 he founded Community Action Nepal (CAN), a UK-based registered charity whose aim is to help mountaineers to support the mountain people of Nepal. Scott continues to climb, write and lecture, avidly supporting the work of CAN. Up and About, the first volume of his two-part autobiography, was published in 2015 by Vertebrate Publishing.
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— Chapter One —
Preparations
ALEX: In the spring of 1982 I managed to inveigle my way on to an expedition. It was going to Tibet, with permission to climb a mountain called Shishapangma, but I would have as readily gone to Harlem for what that expedition had to offer!
On its southern flanks this largely unknown, elusive, barely pronounceable mountain of uncertain altitude boasts a huge, spectacular, visually formidable (and consequently tantalizingly attractive) mountain wall over two and a half kilometres high and twice as broad – an unclimbed, unvisited Alpine playground. To climb it became an ambition, but not just to climb it, we had to make the ascent with style, as light, as fast, as uncluttered as we dared, free from umbilical cords and logistics, with none of the traditional trappings of a Himalayan climb. The wall was the ambition; the style became the obsession.
The tale properly begins in the more obscure regions of the mind of a young man from Belfast. Nicholas John Prescott is a tall, eager, agitated Irishman possessed of fair, aquiline features, an irrepressible buoyancy, eyes framed in gold-rimmed spectacles, a brash and sometimes misplaced confidence and a method of speech that can reduce all but the most hard-nosed listener to a confused resignation. It was in the summer of 1979 that Nick formed the opinion that he would like to climb in China.
In the accessible big mountain ranges of the world, climbing is currently undergoing something of a mid-life crisis. The problem is that almost all mountains worth their salt have been climbed, sometimes by a whole handful of different routes. Virginity has fallen out of vogue with the virtual extinction of the unclimbed summit. It is increasingly difficult to maintain the pioneering spirit in the face of instant information, the need to book a peak well in advance of a projected expedition, the probable presence of a couple of other expeditions at the base camp (and more than likely swarming all over your mountain), and the multifarious trekking groups, cake shops, hotels and hippies on the approach routes. The mountaineer observes himself as part of an industry and, incongruously, it is the tourist industry he is a part of. He may be a somewhat more independent, long-term, purposeful tourist perhaps, but a tourist he is nevertheless. There, is, of course, much to be said for the newly-evolving order. The mountains are readily and frequently accessible without the need for big sponsors or ‘independent means’. Any number of interesting, inspiring and demanding climbs are there to be tackled and the skills synthesized from ever-increasing familiarity with high mountains allow the mountaineer, should he choose, even greater freedom to roam in an exhilarating environment. The possibility for adventure is no less – indeed for the individual the opportunity is probably greater than ever and, if you have forgotten the tin opener, there is a good chance of borrowing one from the expedition next door!
However, even the most hardened socialite can occasionally entertain a feeling of nostalgia for the pioneering spirit and a desire, just once, to avoid the queues and practise his sport amongst rarely climbed, uncluttered mountains in unmapped, infrequently visited valleys. Such promise was perceived in China. Add to that the sense of mystery, the attraction of the forbidden, almost mystical atmosphere engendered by the revolution and subsequent self-imposed isolation of that country, then the excitement generated by the possibility of this slumbering giant’s unbolting a few of her doors is obvious. A billion untapped consumers, a thousand unclimbed summits – the mountaineering world took its place alongside the radio manufacturers, the watchmakers, the fridge salesmen, and pushed. China became the property of the world’s climbing establishments, of politics and contracts, through businesses and meetings with Vice-Premiers – facts to which Nick Prescott remained blissfully ignorant.
Possessed of the commendably futuristic notion that – as Nick put it – ‘it seemed possible that if they had built this highway [the Nepal Highway between Lhasa and Kathmandu] they were going to do something with it’, in 1979 Nick wrote to the relevant Chinese authorities to enquire whether he and some friends might drive over and attempt a couple of modest mountaineering objectives in Xinjiang. An Iranian expedition had recently been granted permission to climb in China, which did seem to confirm the general sense of expectancy regarding her emerging accessibility, but no reply to Nick’s letter was forthcoming, no more permits were being issued and so the project was forgotten.
The following Easter a large envelope arrived on Nick’s Welwyn Garden City doorstep from an organization called the Chinese Mountaineering Association. It contained an address in Peking, a schedule of charges, details of those areas where foreigners would be permitted to climb and an invitation to make an application for a mountain. China had, indeed, opened up though not quite in the way Nick had envisaged. Climbing in China was going to be very expensive; the rates being charged were – and are – prohibitively high. Nick had never been on an expedition in his life, but notwithstanding this fact he decided to head for Tibet. If you were only going to be able to go to China once, then the opportunity to see Tibet had to be seized!
In Tibet two mountain massifs were being made available to the foreign climber – the Everest Massif and the Shishapangma Massif.
NICK: Of the two, Shishapangma looked the most reasonable. The route from the north appeared to be straightforward and, of course, it was lower than Everest. The original application form required that you list three alternatives. There are two glaciers which flow from Shishapangma’s northern side, so one can put down two routes from the north. Probably the best thing would have been to have left the third alternative blank, but we looked at the map and there seemed to be a big valley going up the south side, so we put that down as our third option … we never seriously thought about climbing it from the south.
ALEX: That, however, is exactly what Nick received permission to attempt. The permit was for the spring of 1982. What had begun as a boozy conversation amongst friends from the Bristol area, regarding a possible overland adventure culminating in a modest mountaineering objective, was now an expedition to one of the world’s highest mountains, to tackle one of the world’s outstanding Himalayan Faces, all on the dubious merit that the mountain was lower than Everest and had been climbed once, from the north, without too much difficulty by a Chinese expedition of 165 members! Nick’s sense of optimism was even further underscored by the fact that, in spite of all his good intentions and commendably entrepreneurial instinct, his Alpine climbing experience was scant. Facing a budget in excess of 50 thousand pounds, Nick had now moved into the rarefied world of high altitude and high finance for which his best qualification was an impressive faith in himself.
For a while plans revolved around the possibility of making a film with the Bristol-based climber and film-maker, Jim Curran, and an experienced team began to assemble from amongst Jim’s climbing friends and acquaintances, but as it became apparent that Nick was no monetary alchemist, these melted away. By the end of March he was on his own again. In the first week of April 1981 Nick rang Doug Scott and offered to hand over the permission. Doug accepted immediately.
DOUG: With an average elevation of 15,000 feet, Tibet has aptly been called the ‘roof of the world’. As the rainfall is on the low side and evaporation high, there are numerous puddles in the form of lakes both great and small, mostly without outlet, this being a somewhat flattish roof. In the south precipitation is heavier and melting Himalayan snows all help to form river systems such as the Indus and Sutlej in the west and the Arun and Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) to the south and east. All these rivers break through the main Himalayan divide, pouring their waters on to the plains of the Indian subcontinent. There are many other lesser rivers spilling off the edge of the plateau; these plunge down deep gorges, through rhododendron thickets and coniferous forests to the more humid south. Thus, the Himalaya is carved up into blocks of mountains grouped together under local labels.
At about the centre of the Himalayan chain are the Langtang Himal and Jugal Himal. The highest peak in this area is Shishapangma, 10 miles north of the Jugal. It is separated from the Ganesh Himal to the west by the Trisuli/Gandaki River which flows by the town of Kyirong, and from the Kosi section of the Himalaya – which includes Gauri Sankar, Cho Oyu, Everest, etc. – by the Po Chu/Bhote or Sun Kosi Valley, passing by the town of Nyalam. It is along these valleys and their well-established trade routes that travellers have always approached Shishapangma in the past, and 20th-century mountaineering expeditions also followed these lines of communication, probing the defences of this ‘mystery mountain’.
The naming of Shishapangma reflects the cultural and religious influences of this region. At first there was no debate. It was simply given a number, 23, by the Survey of India during the 1850s. A few of these survey figures survive, principally K2 (K for Karakoram), but the Survey Department did try to find local names for their maps. Until recently the Sanskrit Gosainthan had been used on most Western maps, ‘Gosain’ meaning ‘God’ and ‘than’ meaning place or abode. Obviously, there is a connection between this name and that of the...
