Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The other remarkable prediction in the article foreshadows the coming of the in-
ternet. 'One day, in the not too distant future, we may be sitting in our base camp
trying to choose between
Dallas
and some lad soloing Makalu's west face live,
while trying to keep in touch with the progress of other expeditions by the press of
a button. But perhaps by then, René, John and I will have jobs as commentators!
Yours, Alex.'
You might say that in writing this topic I am proving him right.
When Alex had finished cutting and pasting his article that September day in
1982, he shoved it into an envelope, addressed it to Karrimor's owner Mike Par-
sons and walked a mile into town through the monsoon rains, along teeming,
muddy streets to the post office. Fortunately, the letter reached Mike some weeks
later.
Alex MacIntyre's short but brilliant climbing career spanned barely a decade,
from early 1972 until the autumn of 1982. By the end of that decade, he was known
internationally for his audacious ascents in the Alps, the Andes and the Himalaya.
Reinhold Messner described Alex as 'the purest exponent of the lightweight style
now climbing in Himalaya.' Around the same time, Alex said of Reinhold Messner,
'he had some interesting projects until he took up peak-bagging and became more
interested in number-crunching.'
This impertinent response was recorded in an interview with Ken Wilson for
Mountain
magazine in 1982 during the summer before Alex's death. Wilson
purged it from the final printed version fearing Messner would take offence. But
the comment was typical of Alex - provocative, some might say offensive given the
great man's contribution to mountaineering, and yet, in truth, one way of looking
at the facts. Alex, after all, had graduated with a top honours degree in law. There
was no malice intended in his comment. Alex respected Messner. He considered
his traverse of Nanga Parbat a model for the lightweight style:
'Reinhold is very fit when he arrives and does not, by my standards, do a lot of
acclimatisation. He is an athlete and his approach is to take the peak very fast,
spending an absolute minimum period of time at altitude … but [the approach]
only works where there are few technicalities. Once you have technical problems,
you need to arrive at them fully acclimatised, strong, and with enough supplies to
be able to spend a few days on them. Good acclimatisation and the weight of your
gear thus become critical.'
Like Messner, Alex had a desire to conceive bold projects above and beyond the
ordinary. Ueli Steck continues that tradition today with a different mindset and for
far greater commercial reward. Alex lived in a time when equipment was relatively
primitive compared to today. Scientific training regimes for high altitude had yet
