Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  But there was no room for a campsite on the pass, and the porters were closer to mutiny than ever. The fate of the whole expedition was still very much in doubt.

  The Shipton–Tilman style of writing, like the fast-and-light ethos of expeditioneering the two men espoused, took decades to catch on. During the so-called Golden Age of Himalayan Mountaineering (1950–64), the chronicles that recorded the triumphs on the highest peaks in the world, such as Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna, Sir John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest, and Ardito Desio’s Victory over K2, treated the ascents as masterworks of logistical buildup capped by gutsy summit pushes by a stalwart pair of climbers. These books postulated that the success of only two men in reaching the highest point on the mountain spread its benediction to the whole team, and indeed served their country as a clarion declaration of national pride and supremacy. There was precious little humor in the prose; instead, martial metaphors on every page supported a narrative that veered closer to melodrama than to understatement.

  The Shipton–Tilman vein of dry, whimsical wit came into vogue only in the 1970s and ’80s, partly as a reaction against the jingoism of international mountaineering as it had been waged throughout the Golden Age. Four decades later, climbing writers still strive to hit the Shipton–Tilman note of happy vagabondage laced with gentle self-deprecation. Yet today’s climbing panegyrists all too often go overboard, indulging in the affectation of treating real danger and narrow escapes as slapstick buffoonery. The genuine lyricism that anchors Shipton’s and Tilman’s books gets lost in a self-conscious straining for effect. The difference is a matter of subtlety—Buster Keaton versus the Three Stooges.

  Irony is a delicate technique, and no mountain writers ever handled it better than Shipton and Tilman. The locus classicus of their style is the famous line in Tilman’s The Ascent of Nanda Devi, recording the moment in 1936 that he and Noel Odell stood on the summit of the highest peak yet climbed anywhere in the world: “I believe we so far forgot ourselves as to shake hands on it.”

  Having crested the all-important pass to the Shaksgam drainage, Shipton and Spender and the Sherpas stumbled down the far side to a cheerless camp at the head of the Sarpo Laggo Glacier. The “thrilling moment” of crossing the pass was tempered now by the daunting challenge of getting all the Balti porters with their loads across the same divide.

  On June 4, an exhausted John Auden arrived in camp with the happy news that Tilman had recovered from his high fever and was following a day or two behind. (About the self-sufficiency of the four principals on the expedition, with their blithe ability to find one another after days apart and across unmapped terrain, Shipton makes no bones. It is left for the reader once more to discern and admire their skill.)

  That day Shipton led his advance party farther down the glacier to find a hospitable site for what would in effect become the team’s advance base camp. Within an hour, he had arrived at a grassy glade beside the massive glacier where there was running water, flowers in early bloom, and birds in full song.

  The glade was known Changtok. Both Younghusband in 1889 and Desio in 1929 had camped here on their glancing reconnaissances of the greater Karakoram. The Sarpo Laggo Glacier, though essentially unexplored, was thus known to Westerners before Shipton, and he was not surprised to find vestiges of both camps. The name presents a puzzle: it is Uzbek for “young husband,” though whether Sir Francis himself or someone else so labeled it remains uncertain.

  What stunned Shipton on arriving at Changtok was not the old campsite of his predecessors but the much older remains of stone circles and even the foundations of stone buildings. This was the first of a number of discoveries the 1937 expedition would make of prehistoric, non-Western presence in the middle of this severe wilderness. Musing on the ruins, Shipton concluded that Changtok must have been a regular stopping place on the passage between Baltistan and Yarkand, an ancient trading route so lost in time that its memory persisted (even among the Balti natives) only as rumor and myth. Yet the remoteness of the place, and the difficulty of reaching it, filled Shipton with astonishment at the unknown traders who had pioneered such a thrust into one of the most dangerous regions in all of Asia.

  Ang Tharkay’s account of the 1937 expedition takes up a mere nine pages of Mémoires d’un Sherpa. It is short on the geographic minutiae that Shipton so lovingly details in Blank on the Map, but it reveals a side of the expedition that Shipton largely glosses over. That is the conflict between the Sherpas and the Balti porters, which at times broke out in physical violence. Thus, even before the team reached Askole, an incident occurred that could well have wrecked the whole expedition. Seventeen years later Ang Tharkay recalled it vividly:

  One of the coolies stumbled and fell with his load of ghee and cigarettes. The cigarettes and melted butter fell in a heap together, both of them rendered unusable. This made me angry, and I reprimanded the man for his carelessness. He responded by threatening me with a large stick that he held in his hand. I flew into a rage, ripped the stick out of his hand, and hit him several times with it. His thirty comrades, plus a crowd of villagers, threw themselves upon me. The situation was about to turn ugly when my six Sherpas pulled out their kukris [knives]. They also brandished their pistols. This brought our assailants back to reason.

  Once the “sahibs” learned about the conflict, they lined up the Sherpas like truant schoolboys, scolded them in front of the villagers, and “made us promise to avoid any quarrels in these barbarous environs, where the law of the jungle reigns.”

  Shipton devotes a paragraph to this debacle, but makes it sound as though the incident had been a simple case of cultural misunderstanding. But Ang Tharkay unwittingly reveals just how entrenched even a Shipton–Tilman expedition was in the hierarchical assumptions of Empire. The fact that Ang Tharkay unblushingly refers to his inferiors as “coolies,” his betters as “sahibs,” indicates how imbued even the Sherpas were with that colonial sensibility.

  Weeks later, on the Sarpo Laggo Glacier, another serious conflict arose. Shipton’s narrative laments the difficulty the men have throughout this crucial part of the journey in keeping the porters from mutinying, and he glumly notes the times at which five or six or eight of the Baltis refused to continue and demanded to be paid on the spot. But Ang Tharkay heightens the conflict:

  The coolies became intractable, so Mr. Shipton decided to send them home. For safety reasons he asked Lhakpa Tenzing and me to walk with them to Askole [unlikely, since the team needed the Sherpas at the front]. Lobsang, another Sherpa porter, followed us for some distance, and we had gone barely a mile with the coolies when he shouted at us to stop, because he realized that the coolies had smuggled a load of food and cigarettes as well as a roll of blankets. We tried to stop them, but they rushed ahead until Lobsang and I caught up with them. We had to come to blows in order to recover what they had stolen. One of them pretended to faint, in order to incite his comrades against us and escape with his stolen goods. . . . You could see the extent to which the coolies’ moods and whims complicated our expedition.

  For Shipton, despite the nuisances of load-hauling, the days spent on the Sarpo Laggo Glacier were rapturous. The full team of four was united again. Every day the men could see the summit of K2 soaring in the east. Since that was a fixed point whose latitude and longitude were known, Spender could use it as a base as he plotted all the unmapped peaks and glaciers the team discovered into a comprehensive survey.

  Beyond the snout of the Sarpo Laggo Glacier to the northeast lay the surging Shaksgam River, which flows from southeast to northwest across the high plateau. If the team could get to its banks early enough in the season, they might ford the river to explore a whole separate constellation of peaks, the Aghil Range. In any event, Shipton intended to make an oasis of snow-free land near the Shaksgam, at a place Younghusband had called Suget Jangal, the base camp for the whole four-month reconnaissance.

  Shipton’s account of these days mingles frustration with the porters and the obstacle
s of glacier travel with a dawning anticipation of success. On June 13 the team camped within a short march of Suget Jangal. For once, the dry restraint of Blank on the Map gives way to a passage of unalloyed joy:

  That evening was for me one of the greatest moments of the expedition. Warmed by the unaccustomed luxury of a blazing fire, its leaping flames fed with unstinted wood, I felt that after long days of toil and disappointment we had at last arrived. East and west of us stretched an unexplored section, eighty miles long, of the greatest watershed in the world. To the north, close at hand, across the Shaksgam river, was the Aghil range, with its romantic associations and unknown peaks and valleys. To share all this, I had with me three companions as keen as myself, supported by seven of the most stout-hearted retainers in the world. We had food enough to keep us alive for three months in this place of my dreams, and the health and experience to meet the opportunity. I wanted nothing more.

  When I first read Blank on the Map, I felt the same kind of wistful sorrow that Shipton had when he imagined climbing in the Alps in the time of de Saussure. By 1963, the first year I climbed in Alaska, every square mile of the forty-ninth state had been mapped. This remarkable achievement had come about not thanks to the gutsy work of teams such as Shipton’s, plunging into unknown places and surveying their way from camp to camp, but rather through the high-tech wizardry of aerial photography. In 1963 in Alaska, there were still wilderness tracts that no human being had ever set foot in, but you could buy a very accurate map of every one of them from the United States Geological Survey in Washington, DC. Much of the state was covered by the 1:62,500 series, on which an inch equaled a mile of real terrain. But even the farther-flung regions, such as the Brooks Range north of the Arctic Circle, had been mapped on vast 1:250,000 quadrangles (1 inch = 4 miles).

  By 1963, I suspect, there were still parts of the globe—in Africa, perhaps, or Antarctica—that had not been adequately mapped. But by 2017 every inch of the surface of our planet has succumbed to

  the dream of the cartographers. Today, there are no more blanks on the map.

  In 1967, however, I was granted an exploratory adventure as close to Shipton’s idyll as a young climber could have hoped for. The year before, our team of five had made the first ascent of Kichatna Spire, the highest peak in a compact cluster of granite monoliths rivaling those of the Karakoram. The tiny range, 70 miles southwest of Denali, was officially known as the Cathedral Spires. Today, climbers simply call it the Kichatnas.

  From high on Kichatna Spire’s north ridge in late September, on a rare clear day, I spotted a kindred agglomeration of fierce summits thrusting into the sky some 80 miles farther southwest in the Alaska Range. In four trips to Alaska, I had never before seen those peaks, nor, I would later deduce, could they be viewed from any inhabited place in the Great Land.

  Thrilled by my discovery, I ordered four 1:62,500 quads from the USGS, titled Lime Hills C-3, C-4, D-3, and D-4. To my astonishment, there were only three named peaks in a vast sprawl of glaciers and mountains rising as high as 7,000 feet above their bases. The highest summit in the range stood a mere 9,828 feet above sea level. But I could tell from the dense contour lines that here lay hidden a fairyland of unclimbed peaks, enough to challenge my own and several future generations.

  Two of those peaks had been given the meaningless names North Buttress and South Buttress, but the third—evidently a formidable pyramid of steep rock walls and icy couloirs—was labeled Mount Mausolus. Only one of the dozens of glaciers in this mysterious range bore an official name—the Stony Glacier, lapping against Mausolus on the east.

  To plumb the provenances of this odd assortment of names, I turned to Donald J. Orth’s magisterial Dictionary of Alaska Place Names. North Buttress and South Buttress bore the unhelpful tag, “Local name reported in 1958 by USGS.” That was the year in which the quad maps had been compiled, but what “local name” could possibly mean, with no residents within 70 miles of the mountains, was puzzling. My best guess was that some soulless surveyor out in the lowlands to the west, where the Big River churned through tundra barrens toward its junction with the mighty Kuskokwim, had slapped the names on a pair of distant summits in a moment of bureaucratic taxonomy. Stony Glacier was also attributed to the faceless USGS in 1958.

  Mount Mausolus, however, suggested deep personal history. According to Orth, Mausolus was a “name shown on a manuscript map, probably done by a prospector, dated 1917. He must have been a classicist, because several of his names come from classical history.” Mausolus, ruler of Caria in the fourth century BC, was the builder of the storied Mausoleum.

  Who was the prospector? Where was his map? I should have written to Orth for clarification, but I was too eager to go climbing.

  The wilderness I had become infatuated with stretched some 15 miles east to west and 20 north to south just on the four quads I had purchased. Evidently it spread even farther to the east, north, and south off the edges of those maps. Perhaps a handful of prospectors or surveyors had ventured into the fringes of this range, and maybe in even earlier times bold Native American hunters (Athapaskans from the Kuskokwim?) had nosed against its western ramparts, but I grew increasingly convinced that this sizeable range, promising top-notch climbing, was essentially unexplored.

  According to Orth, the Cathedral (Kichatna) Spires had been named in 1898 by Josiah Edward Spurr, a tough USGS explorer who had passed just south of the stunning cluster of peaks on his ambitious reconnaissance of southwestern Alaska. But the much larger range on which I fixed my obsessive attention through the winter of 1966–67 was unnamed. I couldn’t wait to go there.

  I rounded up five friends for the expedition, four of them old cronies from the Harvard Mountaineering Club, the fifth, Art Davidson, fresh off the first winter ascent of Denali. From the USGS I also ordered the aerial oblique photos from which the maps had been made. I had taught myself the stereo trick of crossing my eyes and focusing at a distance, so in each pair of photos I could suddenly see the mountains in three-dimensional relief, as they would have looked from about 25,000 feet. In a letter to Art, I raved, “The finest-looking peak spreads these perfect ridges over the head of the glacier, just like the wings of an angel.” Art wrote back, “Does the Angel have a reasonable route?” Thus even before we got there, we had named the peak that would become our principal objective the next summer.

  In 1967, we were only thirty years removed from Shipton’s exploration of the greater Karakoram, yet much had changed since his day. Not only did we have the huge advantage of the maps and aerial photos; I was pretty sure we could fly in and land on the glacier that flowed north from the Angel, as we had flown in to a similar glacier in the Spires the year before. In 1937, to explore our range, we would have had to fly to the dirt landing strip of Farewell, 70 miles to the north, then ferry loads across boggy, trackless wastes of taiga and tundra, fording two big rivers just to get to the snout of the glacier I had planned for our base camp. That, to be sure, would have been a much shorter trek than Shipton’s team had braved all the way from Srinagar in 1937; but on the other hand, we could have found no native porters to carry our loads.

  The plan was for Matt Hale, Ned Fetcher, and me to get a three-week head start on the rest of the team. On July 11, I flew into the unknown range with a very jittery pilot. The fellow, I realized, was effectively lost once we passed over the dormant volcanoes of Spurr and Gerdine, which you could see from Anchorage. I monitored the maps carefully, and at last we came in sight of North Buttress, the highest peak in the range. I’m not sure the pilot would have attempted a landing at the head of the glacier had I not coaxed him into trying it with my cries of excitement. As he stepped out of the plane he exclaimed, “Wow! What a place!”

  During the several hours it took for the plane to return with Matt and Ned, I fell into a weird depression. I was unable to walk more than a few yards from our small pile of gear for fear of crevasses, and a single thought surged through my brain: This is the most remote place I�
��ve ever been.

  Yet by late that evening I had warmed to my surroundings as to a second home. The three of us would spend fifty-two days in this unknown range, with no radio or other means of contact with the outside world. Just as the Karakoram had for Shipton, during those seven weeks this corner of Alaska came to be to me the only world that mattered.

  For two days we poked around the nearby branches of our glacier, plotting routes on the half-dozen imposing peaks that hung over base camp. We started up the Angel, but bad avalanche conditions scared us off. Above all, even more than to get to the summits of the peaks, I wanted to explore.

  So on July 14 we set off on a long backcountry loop, intending to circle the main spine of the range’s proudest peaks, just to see what was there. On the maps, it looked like a 45-mile circuit, traversing the lengths of four separate glaciers. We reckoned that it would take us six to ten days. The only possible glitch in our plan, we thought, was a thousand-foot climb up the steep rock-and-snow slope at the very end of the loop that we would need to perform to regain our base camp glacier, so on July 12, Matt and I roped up and climbed seven pitches down that slope to check it out. It proved easier than we had anticipated.

  The Butterfly Traverse, as we jauntily named our reconnaissance, would nearly cost us our lives.

  The first four days mingled delight with challenge, as we spent three and a half hours crawling through a hideous alder thicket to gain a single mile and worried about fresh grizzly tracks we followed along the sandbars of the Big River. By the evening of the fourth day, we were camped just below the pass at the head of the second glacier, halfway through our loop.