NO MORE HEROES - One Day as a Tiger - page 15

CHAPTER 3
NO MORE HEROES
'It's frightening that despite everything we are becoming a British institu-
tion, but all institutions deserve to be questioned and knocked down.'
Jean-Jacques Burnel, The Stranglers
When Alex graduated from Leeds University in 1974, British mountaineering was
in transition. It wasn't simply a case of the older generation passing the flame to
the new one; it was a time when climbers of different eras came together. Younger
climbers were emerging, but at the same time older, successful climbers such as
Chris Bonington, Doug Scott and Don Whillans were still climbing at a high stand-
ard. Most serious alpinists of either generation saw the Himalaya as the place
where the real challenges were to be found. Lower costs and rising incomes meant
the Greater Ranges were becoming more accessible. A growth in climbing media,
particularly Mountain magazine, meant there was much more information on the
biggest unclimbed challenges.
Bonington and Scott in particular were still very much in the game of raising
standards and trying the 'last great problems'. [1] These were the unclimbed faces
and difficult ridges of the 8,000-metre peaks since almost all the major peaks over
7,500 metres in the Himalaya and Asia had been climbed. Attention had shifted
from the highest to the hardest.
Initially, these new challenges were attempted by national siege-style expedi-
tions, a hangover from the earlier rush to be the first on top of one of the fourteen
8,000-metre peaks. (There was a neo-colonialist angle to this earlier phase; the
planting of flags on the world's highest peaks being a feather in the cap of
whichever nation first claimed each small patch of snow in the Himalayan sky.
Just one of the eight-thousanders was climbed by a truly international expedition [2]
and the race was concluded with the Chinese first ascent of Shisha Pangma in
1964. [3] )
These large-scale, well-organised and business-like expeditions - the 'profes-
sionals' - were joined in the mid 1970s by smaller, less formal and less well-fun-
ded teams of climbers, who were more like privateers - fairly disorganised and im-