Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
was suffering the consequences of a bad tin of mackerel acquired from Braith-
waite. There were two lessons that Alex took away with him for future climbs:
avoid taking tins of anything that might be off, or hard to digest, and at altitude,
competition is a killer. Know yourself and know your pace. He accepted that he
had fallen behind in this contest, forced on him by Bouchard, and in future he nev-
er again worried about falling behind others as long as he was comfortable with his
own progress.
Now Alex was at the point of exhaustion and something had to be done. Adrian
Burgess rummaged through his rucksack and found some amphetamine pills, as
recommended by Hermann Buhl on Nanga Parbat. The pill slowly brought Alex
back into action, but it took him a while to get going, so Adrian stayed with him all
the way. Once he felt better, they made rapid progress up the last of the ridge and
all five joined together where the Peuterey Ridge ends before the final summit
dome.
By now, Bouchard had forgiven the deception and was in a euphoric state
brought on by his solo of a new route. All the team were in high spirits as they were
about to make the final traverse of Mont Blanc when, to their amazement, they
were suddenly joined by a solo German climber who smiled and asked if they
would take a photo of him. Everything is relative. They had been overhauled by
one of the great alpinists of the time, Helmut Kiene, who had just completed the
first solo ascent of the Peuterey Ridge, a worthy parallel to their efforts on the
Pilier d'Angle.
The season ended with a road trip to Italy with the Burgesses, Colton, Rhodes
and various girlfriends. The old blue Ford vans had been replaced by a single big
white Transit, which could carry the entire team. Weather in the Dolomites was
not perfect, but MacIntyre and Rhodes did the south face of the Marmolada and
the
Aste-Susatti
on the Punta Civetta. The holiday ended with a trip to Venice
where the van broke down and the team more or less ran out of money. While the
girls managed to secure free meals, the Burgesses got the van going by acquiring
the necessary parts from other vehicles in the car park. They nursed the van
halfway back to the Channel before it broke down again and was sold for just
enough to buy train tickets home.
1. For me there is a strong case to be made that the conquest of the 8,000-metre peaks between 1950 and 1964 was an extension of the so-called
Great Game played by the British and Russian Empires in the nineteenth century. Tensions arose from the expansion of the Russian Empire east-
wards toward Khiva and Persia, and a fear of continued British rule in India and hegemony over Nepal and Tibet. It led to the ill-conceived first
Afghan War in 1829 that set the stage for geo-political issues that dominate to the present day.
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2. Experiences in the blue vans were sometimes more dangerous than climbing. One game was to open the back doors and then two or three
would stand up and, holding on to the rain gutters, complete the remainder of the journey with whoops and shouts. One snowy night in
Chamonix, John Powell fell off the back and no one noticed. On the next bend, Alex lost control and the car spun wildly a few times before coming
to a halt unscratched. He set off cautiously again with the snow now falling heavily. An apparition suddenly appeared to them, a figure staggering
