Porter One Day as a Tiger

Alex MacIntyre and the birth of light and fast alpinism
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-910240-09-0
Verlag: Vertebrate Digital
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

'The wall was the ambition, the style became the obsession.' In the autumn of 1982, a single stone fell from high on the south face of Annapurna and struck Alex MacIntyre on the head, killing him instantly and robbing the climbing world of one of its greatest talents. Although only twenty-eight years old, Alex was already one of the leading figures of British mountaineering's most successful era. His ascents included hard new routes on Himalayan giants like Dhaulagiri and Changabang and a glittering record of firsts in the Alps and Andes. Yet how Alex climbed was as important as what he climbed. He was a mountaineering prophet, sharing with a handful of contemporaries - including his climbing partner Voytek Kurtyka - the vision of a purer form of alpinism on the world's highest peaks. One Day As A Tiger, John Porter's revelatory and poignant memoir of his friend Alex MacIntyre, shows mountaineering at its extraordinary best and tragic worst - and draws an unforgettable picture of a dazzling, argumentative and exuberant legend.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Porter, John

Leseproben

– Chapter 2 –

Public Image

In the middle of the afternoon on 15 October 1982, Alex MacIntyre and the French/Italian climber René Ghilini reached a steep rock band at around 7,200 metres on the south face of Annapurna. The south face is one of the great walls of the Himalaya, a complex assortment of buttresses and steep couloirs three miles wide and a mile and a half high. Of the fourteen peaks over 8,000 metres, Annapurna has claimed the most lives for each attempt. Alex and René were trying a new route, a diagonal line starting from the right side of the face that would eventually lead them to the central summit. If successful, it would be the fourth route on the face. The three main buttresses had already been climbed by large ‘national’ expeditions. In 1970, a British team led by Chris Bonington climbed what was then the most difficult route on an eight-thousander. It went directly up the far left buttress to the highest of Annapurna’s three summits. The Poles climbed the central buttress in May 1981 and the Japanese the right pillar in October 1981. All three of these expeditions comprised many members and climbing the mountain took months with fixed ropes and permanent camps. Alex and René planned to climb the face in three days with two more in descent, just the two of them. If they failed on this attempt, they would be back to try again.

Together they surveyed the possibilities for climbing the thirty-metre wall that now blocked their progress. From base camp it seemed inconsequential, the width of a pencil set against a two-storey house. A tempting snow ramp led left, perhaps all the way to open snow slopes on the other side, but after sixty metres, the ramp narrowed to a thin smear of ice and then there was just a sweep of compact rock. It was impossible. They retreated to a crevasse at the start of the ramp and prepared to bivouac. Climbing safely down the 800-metre couloir to the foot of the face, they would have to start at dawn, while the mountain was still frozen. Brewing drinks, they discussed what equipment they would need to get past this band of rock on the next attempt.

It was after dawn by the time they started down. They were slowed by the initial difficult descent into the couloir. The sun reached the top of the face and slowly descended in a yellow veil toward them, growing stronger. At around 10 a.m., the two men were about halfway down the couloir. From below, where I sat watching them, they were two tiny specks in a sea of snow and rock. Then, in a moment, fate rushed to meet Alex in the form of a fist-sized stone accelerating from half a mile above. It smashed into his helmet with the accuracy of a sniper’s bullet. He crumpled then fell the remaining 400 metres down the couloir.

René clung to his ice axes, stunned for a moment, and then called Alex’s name. When there was no response, he descended as quickly as possible in a semi self arrest, kicking his crampons into the softening snow while jabbing his axes above his head in a controlled fall. When he reached Alex’s lifeless body, he understood death had been almost certainly instantaneous. There was nothing he could do. He forced himself to be calm, to control his own shock and continue his retreat alone. He placed the body in a recess just above a crevasse and marked the spot with Alex’s ice axes holding him to the face. Then he raced the remaining four hours toward base camp on the opposite side of the glacier.

I met him halfway across. I had been watching from the lateral moraine just above base camp and seen the accident through the lens of my camera. All we could do that day was return to the tents; it was too late to go up. That night, René told me the story, about being stopped by the rock step, the conversations they had during the bivvy the night before, how they hoped I would have recovered and with extra equipment we would return and succeed. The evening before, as they descended, I thought my luck had changed. Feeling fit again after a bout of diarrhoea, I hoped we could still climb the face together. Now this. The evening before, as I watched them prepare to bivouac through my zoom lens, a sudden burst of intense red filled the viewfinder. My heart missed a beat but then I realised what I had seen. It was Alex shaking out the bivvy tent.

The morning after the accident, René and I started to pack up to return to the face and recover the body, but cloud descended before we set off and it began to snow lightly. A storm was brewing. We waited another day in a state of uncertainty. Our liaison officer said he would leave immediately to get news back to Kathmandu. I thought of his mother Jean, and Sarah, his girlfriend, and the need to speak to them. We could stay and try to recover Alex’s body, but what would that achieve? It was clear Annapurna would be Alex’s tomb.

There is now a memorial stone for Alex at Annapurna base camp with an inscription that reads: ‘Better to live one day as a tiger than to live for a thousand years as a sheep.’[1] Had René and Alex managed to overcome the short section that stopped them, there would have been few difficulties between them and the top. In 1984 two Spaniards, Nil Bohigas and Enric Lucas, climbed the line Alex and René had tried. It was a brilliant ascent, but their success was testimony to Alex’s vision. Luck had been with them. A narrow runnel of ice led steeply up and over the buttress that had stopped Alex and René.

Alex was 28 when he died, so young his life was little more than a preface, but a preface to what? Alex thought he knew. Just before we left Kathmandu to go to Annapurna, he completed an article for the for 1983 – Karrimor then being among the leading outdoor brands. I have a picture of Alex sifting through the many sheets he had written by headtorch during a power cut at the Lhotse Hotel. He was doing a final ‘cut and paste’ of the article, which meant just that, cutting bits out and sticking them at a more appropriate place in the text, or writing a new paragraph by hand and gluing it over the old one.

With uncanny foresight the equal of anything in H.G. Wells, he predicted changes in modern mountaineering and a revolution in worldwide communications. Here is the first of his predictions, right at the beginning of the article: ‘As we pack our gear for our attempt on Annapurna south face, we do so in the sure knowledge that one day, in the not too distant future, some lad will be packing half as much or less and setting off to climb the wall in a time beyond our comprehension, backed by a methodology and an understanding of the environment that we do not have today. Our lightweight sacks will be like dinosaurs. The Himalaya will, for a few at least, become an alpine playground, while the waiting millions watch!’

In 2013, the Swiss alpinist Ueli Steck soloed a significantly more difficult line to the right of the British buttress directly to the summit on the south face, up and down in twenty-eight hours. Steck, dubbed the Swiss Machine, sets speed records on routes almost every time he steps on a mountain and millions really do watch films of these ascents on YouTube and television. Such an ascent would have been impossible in 1982 with the equipment of the day. And Steck has achieved the highest standards of modern athletic fitness. There are no Olympic events for climbers, but he is the only gold medallist when it comes to soloing eight-thousanders. Even by the generally very high standards of modern mountaineering, active climbers today find Steck’s achievements amazing.

The gap between a very good climber and an exceptional climber like Steck is much greater today than it was in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then climbers soloed routes in the Alps to improve their skills and efficiency. It was training to learn to move fast on similar ground in the Himalaya. Setting a speed record wasn’t part of the equation. Now speed has become almost a separate sport within mountaineering. It puts the experience into a new dimension. There is little to reflect on when writing about a two and a half hour ascent of the Eigerwand. Stopwatches and sponsors dilute the mystique. And yet what does Steck himself say about his achievement? ‘I am not a better climber than Anderl Heckmair.[2] This is just a different style in a different era.’

The other remarkable prediction in the article foreshadows the coming of the internet. ‘One day, in the not too distant future, we may be sitting in our base camp trying to choose between 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 book 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 Parsons 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.’[3]

This impertinent response was recorded in an interview with Ken Wilson for...