words stephen venables

words stephen venables
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FEW CLIMBERS HAVE BEEN AS DEDICATED TO MOUNTAIN EXPLORATION AS ERIC SHIPTON. HIS VISION
OF LOW IMPACT, LIGHTWEIGHT ADVENTURES WAS DECADES AHEAD OF HIS TIME, AND HIS SENSE OF
CLIMBING AS A WAY OF LIFE IS MORE VALUABLE AND RELEVANT NOW THAN EVER BEFORE.
IN THIS EXCLUSIVE PROFILE, STEPHEN VENABLES SEPARATES THE MAN FROM THE MYSTERY OF THE
GREATEST BRITISH EXPLORER OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
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‘When man is conscious of the urge to explore, not all the
arduous journeyings, the troubles that will beset him and the
lack of material gain from his investigations will stop him.’
E r i c s h i p t o n - U p o n T h at M o u n ta i n
I think most of us climbers are package tourists at heart. Our default mode
is ticking the guidebook. We love to follow where others have led, sampling
the delights they have unearthed. Myself, I could never resist the allure of
the great set pieces: few experiences have equalled the thrill of following
the scratch marks across the Traverse of the Gods on the Eigerwand, or
panting up the Hillary Step, or arriving tremulously for the first time on
Vector’s Ochre Slab; even that chaotic pile of rubble, the Matterhorn,
remains perversely attractive. In weak moments, I am even tempted to go and
complete the Seven Summits.
This is all fair and good. To push yourself close to your personal limit on
a great climb, soaking up the atmosphere and the history and the aesthetic
splendour, is one of life’s great pleasures. Ticking lists is not intrinsically bad,
but for me there is just that niggling feeling that I am only following and that
for real, lasting satisfaction I ought to be finding my own climbs. That was
certainly the ultimate aim when we were learning our alpinism in the early
seventies: the dream was to head east to the Himalaya and go exploring. We
knew what people like Dick Isherwood and Rob Collister were doing, and
that’s what we wanted to do too – head up some unknown valley and see
what was there to climb.
In truth, when Lindsay Griffin and Roger Everett invited me on my
first expedition, the valley in question – Afghanistan’s Quazi Deh – was
comparatively well known. Nevertheless, there were still details to be
filled in, odd corners to investigate. Following our noses for three days on
a magnificent traverse of Kohe Sahkt, climbing beautiful granite that had
never been touched by human hand before, was a fantastic introduction to
Himalayan possibilities. You could dismiss it as puerile egotism – that desire
to be first – but the simple fact that no-one had been here before was very
compelling.
That’s one motivation. A much bigger drive, though, is curiosity,
wondering what lies round the next corner. The less you know about where
you’re going, the more potential there is for delicious serendipity. Hence my
delight on another trip, ten years later, when we arrived at Snow Lake, at the
heart of the Karakoram, to find a whole cluster of unclimbed granite spires
we hadn’t known about in advance. Duncan Tunstall and I simply chose
the pointiest one and had a go at it. The Solu Tower gave us some brilliant
mixed climbing, but we didn’t quite make it to the summit, so I returned a
month later to finish the job. Meanwhile we continued, with Phil Bartlett,
on our journey from Snow Lake over the Khurdopin Pass. We had a rough
map and we knew the direction we were headed, but no detailed knowledge
of the terrain. There were huge icefalls to bypass, crevasse mazes to unravel,
crumbling cliffs to evade, rivers to cross, before we reached the sanctuary
of Shimshal. The horizontal journey was as packed with as much technical
surprise as any good climb.
That journey through the Karakoram was inspired by a wonderful book
called Blank on the Map, penned by the man whose name has become
byword for mountain exploration – Eric Shipton. He died in 1977 and I
never met him, but I have met people who climbed and travelled with him,
and of course I have read his books. And, in the course of 40 years wandering
around the world’s mountains, I have found in most areas – as on Snow Lake
– that Shipton was there before me.
His first mountain trip was a long walk through Norway with a school
friend in 1924, followed later that year by his first alpine climbs. By the
time he sailed for Kenya in 1929, aged 21, to set up as a coffee planter, he
had four alpine seasons under his belt and was a thoroughly competent
mountaineer. That competence was demonstrated a few weeks after arriving
in Africa, when he and Percy Wyn-Harris made the second ascent of Mount
Kenya. Not content with simply repeating Mackinder’s 1899 route up Batian,
Shipton pioneered a new route to the twin summit of Nelion, then published
his first article in the East African Gazette, prompting an older planter,
Bill Tilman, to write and ask if he could come climbing with Shipton, as a
change from elephant hunting. After a trial run up Kilimanjaro, the two men
made the first ascent of the West Ridge of Mount Kenya, and a legendary
partnership was born.
There is a tendency to think of explorers simply as footsloggers, tramping
glaciers, with no real mountaineering pizzazz. But the West Ridge of Mount
Kenya has pitches of Grade V. Shipton led the route in big boots, without
pitons, accompanied by an older man whose only previous experience was
a little rock climbing in the Lake District. Retreat would have been very
difficult, rescue out of the question. They climbed this big mountain rock
route, on a 5000m peak, onsight, then traversed the twin summits and
descended the 1929 route, all in a single day. Quite apart from the technical
competence, what really shines out is the boldness of their vision.
It was the same three years later, when Shipton wrote to Tilman to
reactivate the partnership. Tilman had now returned to Britain and wrote
back suggesting tentatively a weekend in the Lake District. To which Shipton
replied, ‘how about four months in the Himalaya?’
Previous Page: John Varco nearing the summit of Saf Minal (6911m). Behind him on the right are Kalanka (6931m) and Changabang (6864m) – part of the defensive ring of peaks guarding the Nanda Devi
Sanctuary. Shipton and Tilman were the first to find a way into this Sanctuary. ian parnell THIS PAGE left: Phil Bartlett and Stephen Venables leaving a good cache on Snow Lake. Venables subsequently made
a solo first ascent of the Solu Tower (5979m) – the third peak from the left on the far side of the Biafo Glacier. Duncan Tunstall this page right: Eric Shipton at the same spot fifty years earlier, with his
photo theodolite. This shot is looking in the opposite direction, to the Khurdopin Pass. RGS picture library facing PAGE: Makalu’s giant South Face towers nearly 4,000 metres above Base Camp in the Barun
valley. Shipton was first to explore this country, in 1952, with Charles Evans, George Lowe and Edmund Hillary, who was to come close to dying in the mountain nine years later. stephen venables
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‘The tendency nowadays to be artificial instead of genuine, and superficial instead of
thorough, is caused in part by everyone being in such a hurry, and partly by things
being made too easy for us… The mountaineer who goes to the Alps with a desire to
climb more peaks than other men, and by more difficult routes, misses the real value
of the experience – the love of mountains for their own sake. The real purpose of
climbing should be to transmute it into a way of living.’
Eric shipton - blank on the map
By now, he had made the first ascent of Kamet and accompanied Frank
Smythe to within 600 metres of the summit of Everest, starting a twenty-year
love-hate relationship with the world’s highest mountain. In the 1933 Everest
team photo, the young Shipton looks out of place. The dreamy blue eyes
which elderly women still remember so wistfully seem to be looking over the
horizon, thinking, ‘what on earth am I doing here?’
Early Everest expeditions were military affairs, and hard-wired into the
military psyche there is a ponderous, cumbersome inefficiency that appalled
Shipton. So, for 1934 he planned a lightweight commando raid into Garhwal
to find a route into the elusive Nanda Devi Sanctuary – just him, Tilman and
three Sherpas headed by the famous Angtharkay, travelling fast and light, on
a tiny fraction of the Everest budget, with money somehow cobbled together
from grants and personal savings.
Shipton was arguably the original climbing bum. As he put it, on his return
from an early expedition, ‘I thought… why not spend the rest of my life
doing this sort of thing?’ Convention dictated that he ought to knuckle down
to building a pension pot, but he confessed, ‘I had always rather deplored the
notion that one must sacrifice the active years of one’s life to the dignity and
comfort of old age.’ Apart from war time duty as British Consul in Kashgar
and a brief spell running the Eskdale Outward Bound School, he rarely had a
proper job. And he never lost his appetite for exploring the world’s remotest
mountain ranges.
The Nanda Devi Sanctuary expedition set the tone. The following year his
Everest ‘Reconnaissance’ mopped up twenty-four Tibetan peaks over 20,000
feet, but it was the 1937 Karakoram expedition that really demonstrated his
breadth of vision. The plans was brilliantly simple: he proposed to get four
Britons and seven Sherpas established in the remote Shaksgam valley with
enough food and fuel to last three months, then see how many hundreds
of square miles of unknown mountain country they could explore before
making their way back south to British-governed India. And then return to
two years later to fill in the remaining gaps in the map!
The resulting book, Blank on the Map, is one of the great classics of
exploration writing. What shines out from this – as from all Shipton’s books
– is a deep sense of enchantment with the country he is travelling through.
As for the photos, they were to inspire a whole future generation of
climbers. The great granite monolith Shipton photographed on the way to
the Sarpo Laggo pass now bears his name, over which have been inscribed
stunning lines opened by the likes of Greg Child, Mark Synott and Igor
Koller, to mention just a few of the rock stars who have been drawn to
the Shipton Spire, as they have by those evocative monochrome images of
the Ogre and the Latok peaks. It was Shipton who provided the stimulus
for people like Doug Scott to come and further the exploration, thirty
THIS PAGE: Mukut Parbat (7242m) and Kamet (7756m) in the Indian Garhwal. When Shipton and Frank Smythe made the first ascent of Kamet in 1931 it was the highest summit ever reached. ian parnell
Facing PAGE top: John Roskelley nearing the west summit of Monte Sarmiento in Tierra del Fuego. Behind him, to the east, stretches the Darwin Range, Shipton’s final field of exploration. Stephen Venables
facing PAGE lower: For twenty years Shipton was devilled by a love-hate relationship with Everest. Here, from the summit of Lingtren in 1935, he gazes at Everest’s West Ridge and the entrance to the still
untouched Western Cwm. L.V. Bryant/rGS Picture Library
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five years later. And on the Nepal-Tibet border in 1951 he found, named
and photographed the gleaming leucogranites of Menlungtse, which Chris
Bonington would come to attempt in the late ‘eighties.
When Shipton photographed the North Ridge of Latok 1 in 1937, any
thought of actually climbing it would probably have seemed very far fetched.
But I think he would of approved of the way it was finally almost climbed in
1978 by Jim Donini, Mike Kennedy, Jeff Lowe and George Lowe, moving
as a self-contained capsule, self-sufficient for 26 continuous days on the
mountain.
As for Everest – the mountain to
which, against his better judgement,
he devoted so much time – had he not
died comparatively young from cancer,
I am sure he would have applauded that
brief flowering in the ‘eighties - before
high altitude package tourism took
over - when it was proved that small
teams could climb adventurous new
routes on the world’s highest mountain
without a great unwieldy bandobast of
high altitude porters, support teams and
logistics managers stockpiling oxygen
equipment.
He would have applauded, but
perhaps that applause would have been
tinged with regret. For all his quixotic,
maverick detachment, he was not totally immune to ambition. Returning
repeatedly to Everest, from both north and south, he must have been
motivated at least partly by the possibility of being first up the mountain. One
of the charms of his books is their candid, conversational style and in his final
autobiography, That Untravelled World, he doesn’t attempt to disguise the
bitter disappointment at losing the 1953 leadership to John Hunt (who, in
his very different way, was just as charismatic). Nor the subsequent sense of
failure after the break-up of his marriage and resignation from the Outward
Bound centre. According to some of his climbing colleagues his charm as
a conversationalist was complemented by a chaotic disregard for the finer
details of logistical planning. After taking part in Shipton’s 1952 Everest
training expedition, when asked for his views about what food to take the
following year, Tom Bourdillon famously commented that ‘some food would
be a good idea.’ Maggie Body, the Hodder & Stoughton editor who cut her
mountaineering teeth on Shipton’s Land of Tempest recalls how surprisingly
vague the great explorer was when it came to drawing the book’s maps.
And therein lies his appeal. There is nothing more odious than an unflawed
hero. Shipton had his weaknesses and inconsistencies, and his fair share
of personal disappointment. However, rather than sink into self-pitying
obscurity after the Everest debacle, he had a kind of renaissance, turning his
back on the Himalaya and heading for
the immense windy spaces of Patagonia.
Between 1957 and 1973 he led ten
expeditions to South America, making
first ascents of some very remote peaks
and, in 1960-61, spending 52 days
making the first full traverse of the South
Patagonian Icecap. Well into his sixties
he was still carrying thirty kilogram
loads, undaunted by the dense rainforest
approaches to previously untouched
peaks in Tierra del Fuego, his enthusiasm
for adventure in the world’s wildest
places undimmed by age.
Everyone who travelled with him
commented on how impervious he was
to discomfort, and noted his total lack
of interest in personal possessions. He
seems to have been a genuine nomadic wanderer: the man in the distance who
would always delight in the view over the next pass. He made no grandiose
claims for his genuinely groundbreaking mountain exploration. He just
enjoyed it and was very, very good at it. As he wrote in the closing pages of
Upon That Mountain, ‘there are few treasures of more lasting worth than the
experiences of a way of life that is in itself wholly satisfying… Nothing can
alter the fact if for one moment in eternity we have really lived.’ n
Eric Shipton: The Six Mountain Travel Books, is re-issued in new
paperback edition, with a new Foreword by Stephen Venables (RRP £18.99 on special offer at £15.99 from www.stephenvenables.com/bookshop.asp)
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