Tag Archive for ‘Mountaineering’ at Asian Window

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Tag Archive for 'Mountaineering'

Nanga Parbat film restarts row over Messner brothers’ fatal climb

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on January 20, 2010

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From The Guardian:

A film retelling mountaineer Reinhold Messner’s legendary ascent of Nanga Parbat, in which his younger brother was killed, has reignited a bitter mountaineering row and prompted fellow climbers to attack as “false” the version of events being portrayed on the screen.

A group of climbers who accompanied Messner, now 65, and his brother Günther on the 1970 expedition have criticised the makers of Nanga Parbat for telling only one side of the story – and have threatened legal action.

The film, by the director Josef Vilsmaier, is being advertised under the slogan “two brothers, one mountain, their fate” and promises to reconstruct the events when Günther disappeared after apparently following Reinhold down Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, the ninth highest mountain in the world and one of the most treacherous to climb. From the start the film, much of which was shot on location, makes clear that it is telling the story “from the point of view of Reinhold Messner”. More

K2: A trek to danger’s doorstep

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on January 16, 2010

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Distant and mysterious, the mountain is perhaps the most feared and respected climbing peak in the world. A traveler journeying there discovers an icy world as perilous as it is beautiful. Graham Bowley in the New York Times:

One day last June, I roped up to a porter and we leaped over crevasses until we reached the side of K2, the second-tallest mountain on earth and one of its deadliest. We scrambled up a few hundred yards to the Gilkey Memorial, a rocky, sandy promontory at K2 Base Camp that commemorates climbers who have died on K2’s dangerous slopes.

The air was loud with the sound of ravens. Metal mess plates, punched with the names of some of the fallen climbers, tinkled gently in the breeze. About 12,000 feet above us, the top of the mountain was hidden by cloud; only its vast toes of black and brown rock were visible, stretching down onto the frigid boulder-strewn rubble of the Godwin-Austen Glacier a few hundred feet below.

It was just below freezing. Descending quickly, I tried not to look at the warren of rocks around me where some of the bodies, blasted by storms down K2’s slopes, were buried. Parts of some of the bodies were visible, and occasionally I glimpsed a piece of ripped climbing suit or an old boot, or smelled something sickly on the air. More:

‘The greatest climber of his generation’ found dead in the Himalayas

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on November 15, 2009

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From the Guardian:

The man considered the greatest mountaineer of his generation, who had been told 10 years ago that he would never walk again, was found dead in the Himalayas today after breaking his leg and becoming stranded on his latest extraordinary adventure.

Slovenian Tomasz Humar, 40, contacted his base camp on Monday to say he had broken his leg while climbing solo in Nepal. Satellite phone contact was made with him the following day, but a source at the camp reported Humar had sounded very weak and said: “This is my last.” It was the final contact he made.

The father-of-two, once rescued by the Pakistani air force in a celebrated mission, scaled the world’s toughest mountains and had been attempting to climb Langtang Lirung, a 7,227m (23,710ft) peak. Rescuers in Kathmandu said that four Sherpa guides with rescue equipment had flown to Langtang Lirung base camp, 6,000m up, earlier in the week and had trekked the slopes where Humar was supposed to be, but could not find him. Heavy snowfall on Wednesday and Thursday also forced climbers to postpone searches. More:

Mt. Everest’s “other guy”

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on November 3, 2009

in India and Sport

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Jason Overdorf at the GlobalPost:

Tenzing Norgay

Tenzing Norgay

At the outpost of Sandakphu, along the border of India and Nepal, the snow-capped peak of Kanchenzonga glistens as the rising sun bathes it in fiery orange. But it is the towering pinnacle of Mount Everest, far in the distance and almost forgotten, that first captures the morning light – and the imagination of the local people. Their most revered hero is “the other guy,” a man that the rest of the world remembers, if they remember him at all, for coming in second: Everest summiteer Tenzing Norgay.

The sherpa who some locals say beat Sir Edmund Hillary to the summit of the world’s highest mountain is omnipresent along this popular trekking route, as well as in the nearby hill station of Darjeeling – the adopted home which he helped put on the mountaineering atlas. Virtually every home here displays a poster of Norgay in his youth with the overly optimistic legend, “Tenzing Norgay: Hero of the World,” or a calendar featuring the region’s dozen-odd Everest summiteers from the sherpa ethnicity that Norgay first made famous. More:

The heights of mass tourism

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on July 17, 2009

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In May, journalist Billi Bierling became the first German woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest from Nepal. She was shocked at the naivete of many mountaineers and astounded that, these days, Everest base camps offer hot showers, Internet access, TVs and fresh strawberries. Lena Greiner has the story in De Spiegel.

: cc/TopGold

“Namaste, where can I put my bicycle?” Billi Bierling asks the waiter in Nepalese in Katmandu’s tourist district of Thamel. The grey mountain bike is the trademark of the 42-year-old journalist from the Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

It’s an essential tool for her work — interviewing mountaineers on behalf of Elizabeth Hawley, the famous chronicler of Himalayan expeditions. “I’d go crazy driving a car in this chaotic traffic,” she says.

Every day Bierling cycles along the narrow streets of the Nepalese capital through a whirl of dust, honking cars, rickshaws and street vendors to talk to climbers before and after they have embarked on their expeditions. Hawley’s database contains the details of all Himalayan expeditions undertaken since 1963. what route was taken, who reached the summit when, was artificial oxygen required, how was the weather, were there accidents? more

Risking the Taliban to confront the deadliest of peaks, K2

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on June 28, 2009

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Graham Bowley in the New York Times. Bowley is writing a book about the 2008 accident on K2 that left 11 climbers dead:

At midnight one evening earlier this month, I slipped out of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, heading north in a white Toyota minibus on a journey to find the second tallest mountain on earth, K2.

My purpose was to write a book about the mountaineers who dared challenge its deadly slopes – to get a taste, if not a full draught, of the danger myself. In the end, I got more than I bargained for, and not from Nature alone.

K2, which towers 28,251 feet above the border between Pakistan and China like an almost perfect white pyramid, is considered one of the most beautiful but also one of the most dangerous mountains in the world. By the opening of this climbing season, only 296 people had ever conquered its summit and 77 had died trying.

But this year, just reaching the mountain had become perilous. I had to travel, in a minibus that felt like a bubble, on a long and treacherous road that skirted Pakistan’s Swat Valley. There, at that moment, the Pakistani Army and the Taliban were fighting for control, making the lowlands south of K2 another of the most hazardous places on Earth. More:

Slipping from Shangri-La

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on June 22, 2009

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Ted Conover at the Virginia Quarterly Review [via 3quarksdaily]:

The line of forty walkers moved quickly, which was good for keeping warm but bad for keeping my balance. Because we were walking on ice, a frozen river. The Zanskar, walled in on both sides by a towering gorge, is the only winter link between villages in that Himalayan valley and the outside world. And it’s only a link for a little while, in deepest winter, when its surface freezes enough to support human footsteps.

The mountain village of Reru

The mountain village of Reru

Zanskar is part of Ladakh-the eastern, Buddhist part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. At more than 11,000 feet above sea level (with peaks as high as 23,000), the area has long been defined by remoteness. The valley has the feel of a cul-de-sac, because there is only one real road in and out-a dirt track from Kargil, an untouristed and predominantly Muslim town just a couple of miles from the disputed border (or “Line of Control”) with Pakistan, to Padum, the main town of Zanskar. Summers are short there, and the Kargil road is only reliably open four or five months a year, from the end of May to early October. After that, snow makes it impassable and the valley gets very, very quiet. But for a few weeks each winter, when the ice is strong enough, the river provides the Zanskaris another way out-an ice road, a forty-mile trail upon the frozen surface called the chaddar.

The walkers were teenagers, mainly. They had maxed out the educational opportunities in Reru, a village with the area’s largest boarding school, and were taking advantage of the cold to get out of Dodge-to make their way to larger boarding schools in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, and in Leh, the capital of Ladakh, not far from the end of the chaddar at the confluence of the Zanskar and the Indus. They also were taking advantage of scholarships, offered by Europeans sympathetic to young Tibetan Buddhists in this poor part of the world. More:

Mystics, misfits and mountain men

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on June 12, 2009

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In the Telegraph, Dayita Datta reviews “Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empires to the Age of Extremes,” By Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver (Yale):

In May 2009, when Apa Sherpa summited Everest for the 19th time, and first-time climber 19-year-old Priti Patil also made it to the top as part of the same expedition, the events merited hardly a mention in the national press. A far cry from the banner headlines that greeted the 1953 expedition, which was even co-opted as part of the coronation as a symbol of a new “Elizabethan Age” (no matter that the successful summiteers were a New Zealand beekeeper and a Tibetan guide settled in India – the Commonwealth was still lit by the fading glow of the Empire). A few weeks ago in the pages of this paper, Anirban Das Mahapatra commented: “Once considered a final frontier reserved only for the world’s most daring adventurers… the peak is increasingly viewed by less-accomplished people as their next summer destination.” These developments underscore the appropriateness of the title of this history of Himalayan mountaineering.

The only time Himalayan mountaineering grabs headlines is when sufficient numbers of Westerners are killed – witness the success of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about the 1996 disaster on Everest. Significantly, the simultaneous tragedy on the North Face was hardly written about – possibly because the climbers were three Indian constables of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police – and the Indian expedition was not wired up in the way the guided camps on the South-West Face were, allowing the world to watch and listen in horror as the dying Rob Hall made his last incoherent phone call to his wife. More:

Peak performance

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on February 17, 2009

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Climbing Mt Everest is all in a day’s work for three Nepalese brothers. Now, they want to stay on top of the peak for 24 hours, praying for world peace. The BBC’s Charles Haviland has the story.

Three Nepalese brothers are to try to break a world record by staying on top of Mount Everest for 24 hours. Pemba Dorje Sherpa, aged 31, and his younger brothers Nima Gyalzen and Phurba Tenzing, intend to use their stay on the summit to pray for peace in Nepal and the world. They will take with them a 30cm (12-inch) statue of the Buddha to the peak. And they are vowing to stay there for 24 hours whatever the weather. Climbing Everest is almost second nature to the brothers, two of whom met the BBC at their small trekking agency in a back street of Kathmandu to explain their plans.

Death or glory: The truth about K2

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on August 28, 2008

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Swept away by avalanches, left dangling at the ends of their ropes and crushed by falling ice – these were the fates of 11 mountaineers who perished on K2 earlier this month. In Pakistan, Andrew Buncombe talks to the survivors, and pieces together a horrifying chain of events that led to one of the worst climbing accidents in history. From The Independent:

Gerard McDonnell died in an avalanche on the Himalayan peak while attempting, fellow climbers believe, to free a trapped member of the expedition. PA / The Independent

Gerard McDonnell died in an avalanche on the Himalayan peak while attempting, fellow climbers believe, to free a trapped member of the expedition. PA / The Independent

Somewhere above 8,000m things are going very badly wrong for Wilco van Rooijen. All but blinded by altitude sickness, his brain and body slowed by lack of oxygen, he staggers and stumbles helplessly down the precipitous slope of the mountain. The searing elation that the 40-year-old had experienced just hours before on reaching the peak of K2, perhaps the world’s most dangerous mountain, is long extinguished. He has already seen two other climbers fall to their deaths and he knows that all around him others are battling for their lives, struggling to get off the slope.

Stranded in the so-called Dead Zone, he forces himself to block out all other thoughts from his numbed mind – his wife and nine-month child at home in the Netherlands, the safety of base camp – and focus simply on surviving. Somehow he has to get off the mountain. “All you are thinking is that you have to survive,” he recalls later, sitting with bandaged, frostbitten feet in a hotel in Pakistan. “You have to get out.”

Van Rooijen was lucky: 11 other climbers were not.

‘I saw K2 avalanche sweep them away’

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on August 10, 2008

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Marco Confortola, a survivor of last week’s disaster in which 11 climbers died, talks about how the catastrophe unfolded. From Sunday Times:

In -40C six climbers gathered at the summit to celebrate conquering K2, the most dangerous of the world’s highest mountains.

Among them were Wilco van Rooijen, a Dutchman, and Gerard McDonnell, a seasoned Irish climber based in Alaska. For both it was a triumph after a previous attempt had ended in injury and failure. Now, here they were, two years on, finally on top of the 28,251ft peak.

As the group tucked away their flags, McDonnell was joined by Marco Confortola, an Italian Alpine guide with whom he had struck up a friendship.

“The two of us hugged as the others started to leave,” Confortola told The Sunday Times last week. “He was like an Alpine flower; I called him Jesus because of his beard.”

Previously in AW:

What makes K2 the most perilous challenge a mountaineer can face?

The Big Question: What makes K2 the most perilous challenge a mountaineer can face?

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on August 5, 2008

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Jerome Taylor in The Independent:

The Independent graphic of K2

The Independent graphic of K2

Why are we asking this now?

Because at least 11 people are currently missing presumed dead on the notoriously dangerous mountain. Located in Pakistan’s majestic Karakoram range, the world’s second highest mountain has long been regarded as a dangerous peak to climb, but the weekend’s disaster constitutes the largest loss of life in a single day on K2’s slopes.

The Pakistani army yesterday managed to rescue two Dutch climbers who were caught up in the mayhem after a gruelling 48 hours stranded on the 8,611m mountain. The men were two of 22 climbers from eight expeditions who attempted to tackle the summit on Friday following a brief lull in the weather. An Italian climber, Marco Confortola, is still trying to make his way down to the 6,000m because the rescue helicopters cannot get any higher in the thin air.

What exactly went wrong?

Initial reports were sketchy but as the survivors came down a clearer picture emerged which pointed towards both a freak disaster and human error. At least nine people were thought to have been swept away by an avalanche after an enormous serac – a large overhanging pillar of ice – broke off the mountain and crashed into climbers on a treacherous part of the final ascent known as “The Bottleneck”.

It’s quite an expedition to the top of Mera Peak

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on June 18, 2008

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Nepal’s complex fee structure calls climbing this mountain a ‘trek’. Don’t be fooled by the terminology, says Stephen Goodwin in The Independent:

Frostbitten toes, swollen and purple, are a sobering sight when you’re bound for the same cold, high place where the damage was done. The young man was sitting in a hut doorway in the hamlet of Tangnag in Nepal’s lovely Hinku valley, massaging his deep frozen digits. He’d reached the summit of Mera Peak a few days earlier, but at a cost. Now his group was heading down valley while our group was hiking up, a little chastened.

As it turned out, the lad was fortunate and got away with just “frost nip”. Feeling would return, though probably with a painful phase, and there would be no amputations. Others in the Hinku during October were less fortunate. Almost every morning during our 10-day trek up the valley we saw helicopters heading for the base of Mera to chopper out frostbitten and/or exhausted trekkers. It certainly made us think. “Are my boots warm enough? Am I really up to this?”

Into the death zone: An amazing mountain rescue operation

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on June 3, 2008

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The attempt by some of the world’s best climbers to reach a dying mountaineer on Annapurna has redeemed a sport once known for its selfishness. Jonathan Brown in The Independent, UK:

Mingma Sherpa ran through the narrow winding streets of Kathmandu engaged in a desperate search. The Nepalese logistics expert employed by a Spanish mountain rescue team had been looking for help all night. It was not until 5am, shortly before dawn in the Himalayan capital, that he found the man he was looking for and began banging on his door.

Inside his hotel room, the Kazakh climber Denis Urubko was sleeping off the effects of a gruelling expedition to climb Makalu without oxygen. For the mountaineer, his conquest of the 8,463m (27,765ft) peak just a few days earlier was the 15th time he had ventured higher than the 8,000m mark – the point which signifies the start of the Death Zone above which human life is unsustainable. Yet, despite his state of near exhaustion, he was unable to refuse the Sherpa’s urgent pleas. He got up, packed and immediately left for the airport prepared, without hesitation, to go straight back into that most lethal of places.

[Photo: The summit of Annapurna, which stands 8,091m above sea level, has claimed the lives of four in every 10 climbers who have reached its peak.]

China shuts down Mount Everest

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on March 14, 2008

in China and Tibet

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Jane Macartney reports from Beijing in The Times, UK:

China has closed Mount Everest to climbers amid fears that activists could disrupt the Olympic torch ascent of the world’s highest peak. The announcement that Chinese authorities had halted access to its side of the mountain that straddles the border between Tibet and Nepal came amid reports of a third day of protests by Tibetan monks around Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.

In a letter to expedition companies, the China Tibet Mountaineering Association said: “Concern over climbing activities, crowded climbing routes and increasing environmental pressures will cause potential safety problems in Qomalangma \ areas.” It added: “We are not able to accept your expedition, so please postpone your climbing.”

Carrying the Olympic torch to the 29,035ft (8,840m) summit has been hailed by the Games host city, Beijing, as one of the grandest feats of the event. Running the relay through one of China’s most restive regions, where many Tibetans chafe under Beijing’s rule, also risks politicising the Games.

Closing Everest – what China fears most

From the Website, mounteverest.net:

China’s worst nightmare for the Olympic torch event is not crowding or safety – the mountain will after all re-open after the torch. China’s worst nightmare is a picture of the flame on Everest summit, alongside a climber holding up a “Free Tibet” sign.

This explains why the officials have tried to convince Nepal to close the peak also from the south side during the Chinese Everest climb. But why would such a sign be dangerous? Why fear the two words “free Tibet” so much?

Nepal, too, puts Everest off limits

From The New York Times:

Come early May, the darkness and the hurricane-force winds will fade and in the lambent daylight a calm will fall on the highest place in the world. Mountain climbers await this interlude, the Everest weather window, when nature leaves its great summit open for a two-week spell before the monsoons come.

Those who aspire to the 29,028-foot peak of Mount Everest, who have their flights arranged and their guides paid, sought to salvage their plans Friday as international politics began to intrude on the yearly ritual.

The government of Nepal, gatekeeper of the mountain’s popular southern face, has disclosed plans to block climbers’ ascents for the first 10 days of May, at the request of China.

RIP, Sir Edmund Hillary: 1919-2008

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on January 11, 2008

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Sir Edmund Hillary, who has died at the age of 88, made it to the summit of Everest in 1953, and became the first man on the planet to reach its highest point.

As a boy in New Zealand, Edmund Hillary’s fragile appearance belied his ground-breaking potential.

At school, he was in a gym group for those lacking co-ordination and admitted to feeling a “deep sense of inferiority”.

But the 40-mile journey to school in Auckland each day gave young Edmund many hours to pore over adventure stories and travel ever further in his mind.

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