Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
there and have a go,' was the creed at least in the early days of the movement. Only
a minimum amount of everything was required to achieve this - anything on top
was a bonus. This would change as reputations grew, but while Bonington could
cash a cheque for a hundred grand, we were happy with a trolley full of groceries
from the local supermarket.
There was no point in taking more than was required. Western goodies were
needed mainly for higher altitudes, with just enough at base camp to add variety to
local staples of rice, lentils, tsampa and noodles. Days on the mountain were calcu-
lated and soup, cheese, chocolate and so forth carefully weighed and bagged. Any
surplus food, and most of the alcohol donated, was used to subsidise travel costs.
Such parsimony only worked because of the revolution in Himalayan climbing
ethics. The generation that entered the Himalayan fray in the mid 1970s had new
ideas based on fitness and skills gained from very hard ascents in the Alps. Our
ambition was to get to the unclimbed 'last great problems' before they were all
climbed by siege-style expeditions.
Since most of the new generation had never been to altitude, there was now a
second phase of apprenticeship to be served. Some, like Pete Boardman, learned
when invited on Chris Bonington's expeditions. The rest were left to their own
devices to learn for themselves. Eight-thousanders were expensive and time-con-
suming, and pure alpine-style tactics on very technical peaks had yet to be fully
tested. So in the 1970s there was a sudden interest in the less expensive and less
well-known 6,000 and 7,000-metre peaks. It was experience gained on these
smaller challenges that provided the training and knowledge to tackle more tech-
nical challenges on the highest mountains.
The British starting point on this modern quest for alpine-style purity above
7,000 metres came in 1975 with Joe Tasker and Dick Renshaw's naive but daring
ascent of the south-east ridge of Dunagiri in the Garhwal Himalaya. Peaks of this
altitude had been climbed by small teams from several nationalities in the past, in-
cluding Alexander Kellas before the Great War and by Eric Shipton and Bill Til-
man in the 1930s. But the route on Dunagiri was technical, graded 'TD-' in the
alpine grading system. It was achieved at practically no cost, with little preparation
and almost no fuss by two climbers with no previous Himalayan experience. In
just nine days, they made the ascent and returned to their base camp in wild and
remote mountains.
When back in the UK, both admitted they could have easily died. They had not
acclimatised properly and had not carried enough fuel to rehydrate and enough
food to maintain energy. Dehydration meant that they became semi-delirious on
the descent and as a result became separated. This was nearly a fatal error. Every-
