Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  Without the maps, we might have headed blind from one valley to another, as Shipton’s team had in 1937. That would have meant finding out whether a loop back to base camp even existed, with no guarantee the route would “go.” Thanks to the maps, I was sure the Butterfly Traverse was feasible. The great joy so far had lain not in discovering terrain no one knew existed, but in being the first human beings to travel across a landscape the maps announced in exquisite detail.

  In the night at our fourth camp, however, the weather drastically turned. A fierce wind drove sleeting rain in an alpine hurricane, as the visibility radically shrank. We could no longer see the dark granite walls that loomed over us on the west, only the gray ramp of our third glacier sloping off into whiteout. The storm would not let up.

  We had a compass, but GPS had yet to be invented. It was crucial to keep the one set of maps I carried from getting soaked into illegibility. But the great problem was our clothing and camping gear. Once our down jackets and sleeping bags became sodden—impossible to prevent in the gale—they did very little to ward off the cold. Our tents lacked fitted rain flies—instead we had scrounged plastic tarps to keep them dry, but the wind ripped them loose like unfurled sails.

  That night, unable to sleep, with the edge of hypothermia creeping into my bones, I talked Matt and Ned into packing up and pushing on in the wee hours. We hoped that movement would stir our blood and cure the shivers, and if we could get down to the lowlands, we might be able to build a fire. All day we stumbled south, losing altitude in the obscure valley. At last we found willow thickets among the boulders, but the wood was too soaked to start a fire. That fifth night’s camp was a trial by hypothermia.

  To find our way back to base camp, we had to identify the correct side-valley coming in from the west among four identical-looking gorges. Here precise map-reading might be the key to survival, for all three of the wrong valleys would lead us into steep ice fields dead-ending against granite walls. Shivering and sleepless, we chose the right valley, and at 1 PM on July 19, we started up the thousand-foot cliff Matt and I had judged a piece of cake the week before.

  We gave Matt the lightest pack, and he led all ten pitches up the rock-and-snow precipice. Coming second, I belayed Matt with one rope and one hand, Ned with another. I guessed that Ned’s and my packs, with all our soaked gear, weighed 65 to 70 pounds each. Everything felt desperate. If one of us did nothing worse than sprain an ankle, I remember thinking, the other two would have to leave him for dead.

  Matt did a brilliant job. At last we crested the col, coiled up the ropes with numb fingers, and sprinted (at a crawl) back to base camp. It took three more days to get warm, as we often kept our camp stoves running through the night just for heat. Later we would learn that the same storm had trapped the Wilcox party high on Denali, snuffing out the lives of seven climbers—still the worst disaster in the mountain’s history.

  The Butterfly Traverse remains the closest call to death by hypothermia of my climbing career. Without the maps, we would never have found our way back to base camp. But without the maps, we would have turned back on the third or fourth day, leaving the dream of the perfect exploratory loop to wiser or luckier climbers in the future.

  On August 2, the rest of our team—Rick and George Millikan and Art Davidson—flew in. During the rest of August, we made the first ascents of nine peaks, but the prize on which we had set our hearts—the Angel, spreading its perfect wings—eluded our grasp after five attempts, the last thwarting Matt and me only 750 feet short of the summit.

  The weather stayed mostly atrocious during that month. Indeed, conditions in our newfound range were the worst I would encounter in thirteen expeditions to the Far North.

  Partway through August, we realized that it was our right, as the first explorers, to name the range. We had already bestowed other names on the most daunting of the peaks that towered over us—Golgotha and Apocalypse, among them—that struck a mythic chord along with the Angel. On the trip I was reading the Bible, not in search of divine enlightenment but as part of my grad school education in literature. The book that matched the gloom and fury of our surroundings was Revelation, and I could not help reading passages out loud. Like the auditors of Saint John the Divine, the six of us craved “a woman clothed with the sun” and “silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.”

  It was George Millikan who suggested calling our mountains the Revelation Range. After the expedition, the name became official. The accounts I wrote for climbing journals about our storm-plagued ordeal seemed to scare off climbers for another three decades. But after the turn of the twenty-first century, coteries of ambitious young alpinists, led by the indefatigable Clint Helander, descended upon the Revelations, putting up routes that we could only have dreamed of. As of 2017, the range still abounds in unclimbed challenges as extreme as anything in Alaska, and aspirants from as far away as Europe are drawn to this frontier of exploratory mountaineering.

  In 1967, because there were no more blanks on the map, I felt that I had been born too late. By 2017, fifty years had elapsed since the expedition the six of us shared in that magical range—twenty more years than had yawned between me and Shipton’s ramble across the Karakoram. Today, there are climbers who wonder aloud what it must have been like to have had a whole virgin range to explore, let alone to have basked in the privilege of giving it the name by which it would be known to posterity.

  By mid-July, Shipton’s team had gotten all their loads ferried down to the “base camp” at Suget Jangal. But one group of Balti porters after another demanded to be paid off and allowed to return to Askole. In the end, only four Baltis remained—the same loyal four that the team had first recruited in Srinagar.

  The men were dead set on exploring the Aghil Range, which they could see looming in the northeast. But to do so would require fording the Shaksgam, the biggest river the team had faced since the Indus. And of course there was no wooden barge here in the wilderness to facilitate the crossing. Shipton decided to limit the Aghil recon to three weeks, for there was no doubt the Shaksgam would run even higher as the summer wore on and the glaciers that fed it melted.

  Wading across rivers is an art at which climbers are far from proficient. Nor, to this day, is there any consensus as to how best to proceed at that dicey business. More than one expedition—like the French who made the first ascent of Fitz Roy in Patagonia in 1952—has had a member drown before the team even came to grips with its mountain objective. On July 19, Shipton and the Sherpa Ang Tensing edged nervously into the churning, ice-cold river. In his usual vein of understatement, Shipton records the near disaster that ensued: “Angtensing and I led the way across the stream, holding on to each other for mutual support. We very nearly came to grief. Angtensing was swept off his feet and I had great difficulty in holding him up until he had recovered enough to struggle ashore. . . . After this, we humbly followed the lead of the Baltis, who knew far more about this hazardous business than any of us, and faced the torrents with surprising nonchalance.” Unfortunately, Shipton gives no indication as to just what technique the canny Baltis employed.

  Only a day later, the team crested one of the main divides in the range, which they called simply Aghil Pass. To maximize the discoveries they might make, they split into three sub-parties, as Shipton and Tilman sent Auden and Spender off on separate missions, each fortified by four Sherpas and a single Balti, with plans to reunite in twelve days.

  For the first time on the expedition, Shipton and Tilman climbed a peak. Gauging the route to be an easy scramble, the two mountaineers did not even bother to bring a rope. The climb, however, turned into a minor epic, as one man had to chip the ice off hand- and footholds before using them, sometimes while standing on the head of his partner’s upraised ice axe. “After an exciting climb,” Shipton deadpans, the pair stood on the peak’s 20,200-foot summit.

  The climb had been undertaken not to bag a first ascent, but to reach a vantage point from which to sort out the unk
nown topography. “The view was magnificent,” Shipton writes, but “too vast to comprehend. . . . I tried to memorize the form of the country to the east, which we had come to see, but it was far too complicated, and I could not disentangle its intricacies.”

  On the third day in the Aghil Range, as they descended a valley on the far side of the pass, Shipton and Tilman made another startling discovery of human presence. This was not a collection of ancient ruins, but rather a “shepherd’s encampment” in current use. “The Sherpas were very excited at our discovery, and evidently felt themselves to be approaching the luxury of a civilized metropolis.” On the other hand, “the Baltis were not enthusiastic at the idea of meeting anyone. They said that the people on this side of the range were a race of giants and were not friendly toward intruders.”

  The weeks that followed amounted to a frenzy of exploration, as each bend revealed a new side valley leading to a previously unglimpsed cluster of nameless peaks. At night the men usually slept without tents, their sleeping bags laid out on beds of grass or sand. Shipton was in ecstasy. “How satisfying it was to be travelling with such simplicity. I lay watching the constellations swing across the sky. Did I sleep that night—or was I caught up for a moment into the ceaseless rhythm of space?”

  It might seem that exploration of the sort the men undertook in the Aghil Range was largely devoid of the hazards of technical ascent. Yet during their four months in the Karakoram, the men regularly braved hardships ranging from waterless camps to treacherous icefalls to stones falling from high cliffs as they wended their way through tight valleys. No obstacles were more menacing than the river crossings. Near the end of June, as Shipton’s party tried to ford a river called the Zug Shaksgam (zug meaning “false” in Uzbek), they survived their closest call of the whole expedition.

  Tilman started across and very soon got into difficulties. When he had nearly reached the far side he was swept off his feet, and was carried, load and all, about ten yards down before he could haul himself on to the bank. His leg was bleeding freely and he had lost his ice axe. But in spite of this I did not take the river very seriously. . . . I threw a rope across to Tilman, and together we held it taut across the torrent. Lobsang and Angtharkay waded out into the stream, hanging on to the rope. In a moment Angtharkay was knocked over. Lobsang made a desperate effort to hold on to him, but Angtharkay was wrenched from his grasp by the force of water and was carried down, battered against the rocks in midstream as he went. . . . It was horrible to stand there watching Angtharkay being pounded to death without being able to do anything to help him. Each time he was flung against a rock I thought he would be stunned, and every moment I expected to see his head disappear for the last time. He was approaching a steeper drop in the river bed, when, by an amazing chance he was caught up on a large rock sticking out of the water.

  After running down the bank, Shipton and the Balti porters were able to help Ang Tharkay to shore. The Sherpa was completely exhausted and bruised all over, but not seriously hurt.

  “I was acutely aware that my own stupidity had very nearly caused his death,” Shipton confessed. As it was, the fiasco forced the divided party to bivouac for the night on opposite sides of the river.

  After three weeks in the Aghil Range, the men reunited near the banks of the Shaksgam, each sub-party regaling the others with their adventures. On July 9 they returned to Suget Jangal. The expedition was only half over, but already the various contingents had sorted out the convoluted topography of a half-dozen unknown glaciers and scores of peaks. The return to base camp occasioned another outpouring of gratified contentment from Shipton.

  Suget Jangal was a perfect resting-place, for it had the quality of serene peace, rare in this country of stern severity. Some tall shrubs which grew beside the shallow blue pools were now covered with pink blossoms. The song of small birds, the splash of a brook which welled from a crystal spring, the young hares running shyly across the meadows all welcomed us, and we lay on glades of soft green grass, half hidden in shady caverns of willow branches.

  Yet even on his last day in the Aghil Range, as he prepared to return to the main Karakoram, Shipton felt the sting of regret: “I had become very attached to this place, and was most reluctant to leave. But one day I shall go back there, prepared for a long stay, to gain a real knowledge of the range.”

  From Suget Jangal, the team now set out to explore the northern approaches to K2. No part of the Karakoram is wilder or more difficult to penetrate. Pushing up the K2 Glacier, as the men had named the ice flow that drains the great mountain on the north, Shipton and Tilman ran into a labyrinth of crevasses and nieves penitentes—weird ice pedestals as tall as 150 feet. At last, on July 14, the men stood at the base of the stupendous north face of the world’s second highest mountain. The summit of K2 would first be reached by an Italian team in 1954, but no climbers would solve the much more daunting north face and north ridge until 1982, when a Japanese team, after a massive logistical buildup, put three men on top (one of whom died on the descent).

  Shipton recorded his awe as his eye swept the 12,000 vertical feet from glacier to summit. “The sight was beyond my comprehension, and I sat gazing at it, with a kind of timid fascination, watching wreaths of mist creep in and out of corries utterly remote. I saw ice avalanches, weighing perhaps hundreds of tons, break off from a hanging glacier, nearly two miles above my head; the ice was ground to a fine powder and drifted away in the breeze long before it reached the foot of the precipice, nor did any sound reach my ears.”

  After the Aghil Range and the northern approach to K2, there still remained a huge tract of unmapped land to the west for the team to explore. One could retell each triumph in this four-month campaign of geographic success, but to do so would amount to a poor substitute for the vivid account Shipton has left in Blank on the Map. Instead, it may suffice to touch on a few of the high (and low) points of that summer of discovery.

  In early August, on one more unnamed glacier, Shipton and Ang Tharkay suffered another close call—one that Shipton again unhesitatingly blamed on his own “stupidity.” Well after dark, roped together with Shipton in the lead, the men came to a badly crevassed section. Worn out after a very long day, almost within sight of camp, Shipton let down his guard.

  Suddenly I felt the ground give way from under my feet and found myself falling through space. It seemed an age before a tug came from the rope, and I had time to wonder whether it was really tied around my waist! But at length my fall was checked with a sudden jerk; it felt as if the rope had nearly cut me in two. It was difficult to judge how far I had fallen. The ragged patch of starlit sky, at the top of the hole through which I had dropped, looked very far above me.

  The “stupidity” consisted of traveling across a dangerous glacier after dark, and going as a rope of only two, for in Shipton’s present predicament it was impossible for the much lighter Ang Tharkay to haul him to the surface. Shipton managed to start chimneying between the walls of the crevasse, but he soon thrust his foot against an icicle that broke loose, and he fell back into the depths, this time landing in a moat of glacial water. “I tried to find some purchase below the surface of the water,” Shipton recalled, “but could find nothing but loose bits of ice floating about. I was becoming very cold, and there was not much time to waste before numbness would make action impossible.”

  As usual, Shipton underplays the superhuman effort it took to get an arm hooked over a bollard of ice protruding from one wall of the crevasse, and, with a strenuous tug on the rope from Ang Tharkay, pull himself out of the water. Shipton then managed to chimney the rest of the way to the surface. “I sat gasping on the ice while Angtharkay banged and rubbed my limbs, which had lost all feeling,” Shipton later wrote. “I was lucky to have got off so lightly.”

  On August 10, to maximize their discoveries, the team once more broke into three sub-parties. So autonomous were the men by now that Auden would reunite with his teammates only weeks later, in Srinagar. Tilman took t
wo Sherpas and set off with twenty-three days’ food to explore to the west and south. If the men felt gloomy on parting, Shipton’s narrative never lets on. Instead, he covers the farewell in a single jaunty sentence: “At the upper camp we said good-bye to Auden and Tilman, whom we did not expect to see again until we got back to England.”

  During those twenty-three days, Tilman performed a tour de force of reconnaissance, crossing five high passes and traversing six unknown glaciers. To recount that accomplishment, he contributes a single chapter, titled “Legends,” to Blank on the Map. The contrast in styles between Shipton and Tilman leaps from the page. Shipton’s wit, on the whole, is drier, his flights of joy more lyrical. Tilman keeps his tongue firmly in cheek and confesses to the pleasures of discovery only in the most reticent of passages.

  As his party traversed a ridge between two of those glaciers, they came upon a set of strange footprints in the snow. Tilman deadpans: “we saw in the snow the tracks of an Abominable Snowman. They were eight inches in diameter, eighteen inches apart, almost circular, without sign of toe or heel. They were three or four days old, so melting must have altered the outline. . . . We followed them for a mile, when they disappeared on some rock. The tracks came from a glacier pool where the animal had evidently drunk . . .”

  From the 1930s well into the 1990s, a great debate about the possible existence of the Abominable Snowman, or Yeti, raged among Himalayan travelers. No less an authority than Reinhold Messner would later declare his unflinching faith in the existence of the fugitive beast. But according to Jim Perrin, in Shipton and Tilman: The Great Decade of Himalayan Exploration, the existence of the Yeti was for these two best friends “a standing joke between them that was perpetuated for over fifteen years at least.”

  In “Legends,” with his Swiftian penchant for spinning a virtuosic fantasia out of a satiric conceit, Tilman uses his Sherpa companions as foils: “The Sherpas judged [the tracks] to belong to the smaller type of Snowman, or Yeti, as they call them, of which there are two varieties: the smaller, whose spoor we were following, which feeds on men, while his larger brother confines himself to a diet of yaks. My remark that no one had been here for thirty years and that he must be devilish hungry did not amuse the Sherpas as much as I expected!”