Thieves, Liars and Mountaineers

by Mark Horrell

  I ask Tunch to confirm an old urban myth for me regarding the manager of the Welsh national football team.

  “The manager of Wales is a man called John Toshack,” I say, by way of introduction. I study Tunch carefully for any sign of a reaction, but he remains impassive.

  “But at one stage in has career,” I continue, “he went to manage the Turkish side Besiktas, but had to leave because apparently in Turkish ‘toshack' means ‘bollocks'.”

  Still Tunch's expression doesn't change, but his answer is clear. “Yes,” he says, “this is absolutely true.”

  41. The Iranian garbage incident

  Tuesday 21 July, 2009 – Camp 1, Gasherbrum Cwm, Pakistan

  Every crevasse, serac, undulation, stream and snow hole on the trail through the South Gasherbrum Glacier has become familiar. Occasionally the path changes to divert around a crevasse which has now become too wide to leap over, sometimes a thin layer of ice crumbles and a new icy stream appears, and today at one stage the path is blocked by a tumble of giant ice blocks which have melted and fallen, and we have to scramble over them, but the general route has remained the same. By this time next year every ridge and crest will have completely vanished and a new route will have to be found.

  Today we make our fifth climb through the icefall, and perhaps our last, myself, Michael, Arian and Gorgan. Phil and Gordon, perversely, have decided to come up later in the afternoon and arrive in Camp 1 late this evening. We set off at 6am, and at the bottom of the icefall the ice is very rotten, but the path is still surprisingly good. It's another decent clear day and unusually warm, but high overhead lenticulars and wispy cirrus clouds travel at a great rate. Wind speeds near the summit are still a major concern.

  Passing between seracs in the icefall

  As we approach Camp 1 in the Gasherbrum Cwm at 10.30, Gorgan and Arian start abusing a group of Iranians who are sitting outside their tents with all their food spread out on a mat of blue canvas.

  “You are f---ing disgusting!” Gorgan cries at them.

  At first I think these people are their friends and this is just a round of friendly banter, but the Iranians remain very quiet, and one or two of them are wearing shocked expressions.

  “Would you like me to come to Iran and throw rubbish all over your country?” says Arian.

  Our two French friends have just seen them casually emptying a sack of rubbish down a crevasse. Michael and I look on in silence, but Gorgan and Arian are very angry, and as Gorgan continues to hurl abuse at them I try to lead him away. The point has been made.

  Gorgan's posh toilet, which he dug in the snow last time we were here at Camp 1, has had some use in the intervening days and now requires some work. The hole has become too wide for any but gymnasts to be able to crouch down comfortably, so it's necessary to perch on the edge where it's very slippery, preferably gripping an ice axe to steady yourself. A comical accident seems inevitable, but fortunately I get my job done without mishap, and won't be needing to use it again for a while.

  Later in the day we see twelve small figures making their way down from Camp 3 to Camp 2, and one of the Iranians comes over to ask if we have any oxygen. They say one of their group is struggling and has taken 5 hours to descend just 100 metres, though it looks to us as though they're descending more quickly than that. The figures we've been watching are the Iranians whom we believe to have reached the summit yesterday. It seems they've reached Camp 2 and found some oxygen which they would like to use, but it's not ours. They ask if we can radio down to Base Camp to find out from the owner if it can be used. We think it belongs to the Canada West group, who are planning to use it for their own summit attempt. We know Phil, who is touchy about our Sherpas being overworked, will not be pleased if we radio down for help and get his Sherpas dragged into a rescue operation, so we offer them Diamox and high altitude drugs for cerebral and pulmonary oedema instead, but they decline.

  All is quiet at Camp 1 for a while. Then at 5 o'clock everything kicks off.

  42. Death of a climber

  Tuesday 21 July, 2009 – Camp 1, Gasherbrum Cwm, Pakistan - part 2

  I'm outside the tent collecting snow and talking to Gorgan, Arian and Michael, who are all looking at the mountain and watching the climbers come down from Camp 2, when the Portuguese couple, Paulo and Daniela, come over in an agitated state.

  “One of our friends is missing!” says Paulo. They both start talking together and the message is garbled, but they are clearly upset.

  “His name is Luis and he was climbing with Jasek. Jasek turned round at 2 o'clock and Luis went on, but although he looked for him for 4 hours, he never came back to the tent,” Paulo continues.

  “We climbed with him here last year,” says Daniela, “and he was obsessed with reaching the summit. My god, he's gone and got himself killed!”

  My first instinct is that Paulo and Daniela have got hold of some snippet of information and are jumping to conclusions. I've never known anywhere like Base Camp for rumour and hearsay. People overhear snatches of conversation over the radio, Chinese whispers occur between climbers who pass each other on the mountain or in camps, and very little information ever seems to be reliable. Probably 90% of what I hear in Base Camp about climbers feats, incidents and weather conditions, is later contradicted. For instance, we are about to find out that nobody reached the summit yesterday after all, contrary to the report we heard before dinner that five Iranians did.

  We try to calm Paulo and Daniela down. It seems two more climbers, Luis and Jasek, also tried for the summit yesterday along with the Iranian team, and one of them, Luis, hasn't returned. But we don't know for certain that he isn't still alive. Could he have crawled into a tent late and be asleep somewhere that nobody has noticed? But Paulo and Daniela have been told there are no tents at all at Camp 4, not even old abandoned ones from previous years. Everyone who attempted the summit yesterday stayed at Camp 3, and the Iranians seem to have all packed up and left – we've been watching their progress down to Camp 1 for the last few hours. That leaves Jasek and Luis, who were sharing a tent at Camp 3 which belonged to Luis.

  “Could Jasek have left early this morning and Luis crawled back to the tent later?” I ask. “Perhaps he's now safely in his tent at Camp 3.”

  “It's possible,” says Paulo, “but I don't know …” He sounds sceptical.

  Just at that moment the first Iranians arrive back in Camp 1. Arian greets one of them as Ali.

  “Have you seen the Spanish?” says Daniela, rushing over to him.

  “He is missing,” says Ali. “He is gone. We got within 50 metres of the summit, but then … very technical rock climb. Everybody turned back except the Spanish. We tell him not to go, but …” He throws his arms up in the air in a gesture of despair.

  Not far behind him is Luis's companion Jasek, who turns out to be none other than the notorious Polish Jack. He trudges into camp leaning heavily on his two trekking poles. He isn't wearing any gloves, and his hands are black and callused. Not only does he look tired, but emotionally drained, and we all descend upon him to hear his story. His English is not good, but it's not hard for him to make himself understood.

  “We reach final part of summit at 2 o'clock. I plead with him, I say, ‘please, Luis, don't go.” Polish Jack puts the palms of his hands together in a gesture of supplication. “Then I say, ‘Luis, don't go up or I kill you!'” He puts his fist to his chin, as though to punch himself. “But still Luis insist, so I say, ‘OK, I wait for twenty minutes.' But I wait 3, 4, 5, 6 o'clock.” He counts the hours out on his fingers. “I shout his name, ‘Luis, Luis,' but still he not come. So I go.”

  He is clearly distraught, and finds his words with great difficulty. Probably he blames himself a little for not stopping his friend, and perhaps he thinks that we are blaming him for what happened, too. But it sounds like he did all he could, and despite the rumours that we heard about Polish Jack yesterday, about him taking things from other people's tents, I feel very very sorry for him.


  A little while later the doctor from the Iranian team arrives and confirms the same story.

  “We all turned around, but the Spanish went on, though we told him not to. We got back to camp and he never returned, so we were flashing our lights into the darkness to try and bring him back, but nothing. It was very windy up there, 60 to 80 kilometres an hour, and after dark it was very cold. There is no way he could have survived a night up there.”

  Paulo and Daniela, and to a lesser extent Arian and Gorgan, seem to be unhappy with the Iranian team, and feel they should have done more to help, but I'm not so sure. They tried to persuade him to turn around, but once he's refused, a single independent climber is no longer their responsibility. With the poor weather conditions, high wind speeds and cold temperatures, they would not be able to linger without risking frostbite, and they would want to get back down to camp as soon as possible. Once there, it would be several hours before the Spanish climber's failure to arrive would become a serious concern, and to go back up to the summit after nightfall when they are already exhausted from their own summit attempt, would be putting their own lives at risk. But they didn't give up on him then: they flashed their lights to try and guide him down. It's hard to see what else they should have done.

  “At least they could have stayed at Camp 3 an extra day to wait for him,” says Gorgan.

  But again I'm not so sure. It's easy to judge when you're not in that situation yourself. “You heard the opinion of the doctor,” I reply. “He's unlikely to survive a night up there.”

  “But it's funny why the five Iranians sitting here at Camp 1 never said anything to us about the missing Spaniard when we arrived,” says Michael.

  “Well, that's hardly surprising – the first thing we did when we arrived was give them a truckload of abuse about dumping rubbish in a crevasse. They're hardly going to strike up a conversation with us after that!”

  Despite the desperate scenario, we persist in our hope that the Spanish climber may still be alive. Gorgan brings out his binoculars and Michael begins scanning the route below the summit for any sign of a person. At the far right hand side of the summit pyramid, just below the point where the rocky summit ridge meets the top of the snow slope on the horizon, he sees a small black object which could be a person, but could also be a rock since it appears to be stationary. I peer through the binoculars myself and agree with this opinion. A few minutes later, however, Michael notices the small black object is no longer there, but there is another small object a little further along the slope. Again I look myself and decide if the object is a person then they are lying down in the snow. But the object doesn't move for a long while, and eventually we stop looking at it. Landslides and avalanches are two a penny around here, and perhaps this was just a boulder which rolled a few metres down a steep slope after the snow melted around it. There is certainly not enough evidence to suggest there's a person alive up there to mount a rescue operation that will put other lives at risk.

  The route above Camp 2 on Gasherbrum II

  Meanwhile Paulo and Daniela still seem to be very upset with the Iranian team. Apparently a report has reached Base Camp that someone saw the Spanish climber fall to his death after a cornice collapsed beneath him just below the summit.

  “Why do they make these stories up?” says Paulo.

  “For them it is just, ‘we reached the summit, we reached the summit!'” says Daniela.

  But again I find this harsh. “We get this rumour and hearsay at Base Camp all the time,” I reply. “Who knows where these stories come from, but there's no reason to think there's anything malicious or sinister about them.”

  It seems to me that Paulo and Daniela were friends with the Spanish climber, and as commonly happens in these situations, they are looking for someone to blame for his death. This is understandable, but it's wrong to try and blame the Iranians. They are clearly upset about what's happened and have all been very subdued as they returned into Camp 1. There's certainly been nothing triumphal or celebratory about their arrival. At the end of the day, there's only one person to blame for the Spanish climber's death, and that's the climber himself, who insisted on going on and climbing a hard technical rock section at 8000 metres without any fixed rope or protection, when everyone else turned round and urged him not to.

  To reinforce this opinion, the leader of the Iranian team comes over to us a little while later with the climber called Ali.

  “Where is Phil?” he asks us.

  We explain that Phil is coming up later today and won't be here till late this evening.

  “Are you going on summit push now?”

  We nod.

  “Because we get weather forecast from University of Tehran. Very accurate, and they are telling us there is terrible weather for the next three days, but after that it is better.”

  There is a great deal of emotion in his eyes and he is talking through Ali now. “We had terrible weather conditions and it is getting worse. We command you, please do not go up until Saturday.”

  Phil arrives with Gordon at about 7.30pm. He's fallen into several snow holes on his way through the icefall and is in a very pessimistic mood. We explain about the weather forecasts we've been hearing, and ask what he thinks about staying an extra day in Camp 1, to delay our summit push by a day and coincide it with the better weather.

  “Dude, I'm going to stay up here a couple of days, and then I'm going back down again. I've had enough of this weather. I don't think the jetstream's going to move off the mountain. The forecasts have been saying it will for weeks now, but the weather window keeps getting pushed back. Now it's happening again.”

  It looks like Phil's now given up on us ever getting to the summit, but then he adds: “Gordon's going up, though, and if you decide to stay the Sherpas will probably come, too.”

  Phil and Gordon have also received garbled messages about what happened to the Spanish climber Luis. Phil says that both the Iranian leader and Paulo and Daniela spoke to him as he arrived in Camp 1 and gave conflicting accounts. As we've been talking to people returning from the summit throughout the day, we probably know as much as anyone, so we fill him in on what we've been able to conclude.

  “The trouble is, everyone's very emotional,” says Phil. “They all knew this climber and are attached to him. I'm not attached to him. He's dead. That's it.”

  Callous as this may sound, Phil has seen many deaths in his years working on big mountains, and it naturally causes him to react differently to them than the rest of us. Besides, there's truth in what he says, and the dangers of high altitude mountaineering require an objective view like this to complement the emotion. But the trouble is, one of the things Phil said definitely isn't true, and it's a very important one.

  Unbeknown to us, the climber's not dead yet.

  43. A light from on high

  Tuesday 21 July, 2009 – Camp 1, Gasherbrum Cwm, Pakistan - part 3

  At 9.45pm we're all tucked up in our sleeping bags and trying to get some sleep after all the excitement of the day. This is pretty much the latest night we've had on the expedition, but it's about to get longer. There are lights outside our tent and voices. Somebody is trying to wake us up.

  “There is a light,” an Iranian voice says.

  I sit up and open the back entrance of our tent, which faces directly onto the south face of Gasherbrum II. The night is clear, and I can just make out the dark triangle of the summit pyramid high above us. Halfway along the lighter shade of the snow traverse immediately below it, there is a pinprick of light flashing intermittently. It's about four hours after Michael and I saw the black dot apparently move at the top of the traverse, and the position of the light would tally with a person crawling along the traverse back to Camp 4 from the base of the summit ridge.

  I have my torch out, and from the tent next door Gordon the mountain rescue volunteer suggests I shine single, double and triple flashes in succession to try and open up a line of communication and establish whether it's
definitely a person up there. Unfortunately by now half the people in Camp 1 are shining their torches, so there's no way a person up there would be able to figure out we're trying to signal some sort of code. In any case, by now I'm under no doubt whatsoever there's definitely someone on the traverse trying to contact us, and it can only be the Spanish climber, Luis.

  Michael and Arian are out of the tents by now and going over to wake up Paulo and Daniela, his friends. They come back a few minutes later, and the two Portuguese are keen to go up there right away and try to get to him. Polish Jack is also awake and keen to join them, and Michael and Arian are both prepared to go with them. As for me, however, I'm sitting up inside my tent listening to the goings-on outside, and keenly aware of the fact that the two people in the tents either side of me are Phil and Gordon, two very experienced mountain rescue experts. I can't even begin to think how we're going to go about rescuing this person, and judging by their silence, Phil and Gordon are also trying to think. Eventually I hear Gordon's voice interrupt the people outside.

  “Come on into the tent,” he says. “Huddle round; let's think about this one.”

  “How long do you think it's going to take you to get up to Camp 4?” I hear him say a moment later.

  “About 12 hours,” Paulo replies. “Eight hours to Camp 3 and another four to Camp 4.”

  “And you've been up there. How far beyond Camp 4 is he now?” says Gordon again.