Ramiro Navarette (Ecuador), Carlos Carsolio (Mexico) and my climbing partner Steve Untch.
Mud and rockslides caused by monsoon rains blocked the road in many places, and we had to walk most of the way to the Nepal–Tibet border. It was very hot and humid so we often stopped to cool off in the many waterfalls and plunge pools along the way. We soon lost our inhibitions and got to know each other fairly well. The French female contingent fearlessly led the skinny-dipping, rapidly followed by the British and US contingent (Steve and myself). As you would.
Crossing the border from Kodari in Nepal to Zhangmu in Tibet was a curious experience but uneventful. We lodged in the so-called best hotel in town, a scruffy concrete multi-storey building. The TVs did not work and the en suite bathrooms in each bedroom were not plumbed in. Instead there was a squalid porcelain-tiled communal toilet room with a slit in the floor and a big stick to poke the solids down. There was no dining room in the hotel but further up the street a ‘restaurant’ perched on the edge of the Bhote Khosi gorge served palatable food and excellent bottled Chinese beer. To our amazement, after each course most of the plates, the left-over food and all the empty bottles were thrown out of the window into the gorge. Looking down we could see a huge pile of broken bottles and rubbish.
We travelled by Land Cruiser to a roadhead base camp at 5000m, stopping at villages such as Nyalam for a few days’ acclimatisation en route. The Tibetan Plateau was a complete contrast to the hot, humid Nepalese lowlands. Here it was clear, bright, sunny weather and sunburn was a problem, although the nights were icy cold. We hired yaks to take us up to 5900m and the nomadic yak herders arrived to meet us as if by magic, emerging from the barren Tibetan wilderness. Exuding an aroma of smoky yak excrement tinged with rancid yak butter, they certainly looked like proper Tibetans, with jet-black, shiny, plaited hair; most of them were dressed in woollen felt and animal-skin clothes and bootees. To us they were wild-looking characters, but to them we climbers in our modern fleece and Gore-Tex kit must have seemed like peculiar aliens. Unfortunately they also took a fancy to some of our stuff and we had to guard all our kit and supplies carefully.
Jerzy Kukuczka meets nomadic yak herders on the Tibetan Plateau while en route to Shisha Pangma in 1987.
Yak herders’ tent in Tibet with Shisha Pangma behind.
Jurek and Artur planned to climb together, attempting a new route, the traverse of the skyline ridge of Shisha Pangma. Steve and I also had our sights on a new route, lightweight and Alpine-style, just the two of us. We had noticed the obvious diagonal ramp line and couloir running right to left up the North Face, starting from a high altitude basin-like glacial valley at 6900m. Wanda later told me that Reinhold Messner had wanted to climb this line in May 1981 but backed off because of deep monsoon snow. It looked like a steep snow climb at first, reminiscent of a giant steep but easy Scottish gully, such as Number 2 Gully on Ben Nevis. However, higher up it became a lot steeper, icier and rockier before it joined the summit ridge that Jurek and Artur would be climbing. The rest of the team were climbing together up the original route first climbed in 1964. Shisha Pangma was the last 8000er to be climbed, mainly because it was in Tibet and until the 1980s western climbers had been refused access.
By the end of August, using our experience of many other climbs up to 6500m, Steve and I had acclimatised to nearly 6800m when we narrowly missed being engulfed in the avalanche. But 8000m was a new concept. We could hardly have started our summit attempt in a more naïve fashion, planning our Alpine-style ascent without fixed ropes or a tent. I can barely believe we got away with only taking Gore-Tex bivi bags for the final push. We were incredibly lucky and this was the last time I went so high without taking some kind of bivouac shelter.
As so often happens in the Himalaya, the weather broke and we were holed up at Base Camp for over a week in cold, murky conditions with fresh snowfall most days. I didn’t get bored or even frustrated, as there was plenty of vodka and general craic to be had with the expedition team. By mid-September the weather started to clear and, seizing the opportunity, we left Base Camp. Our overloaded, heavy rucksacks, with equipment strapped to the sides, weighed more than 20kg making it an arduous slog up to the bottom of our chosen line, the unclimbed couloir cutting right to left up the north face. Eventually we pitched a tiny bivouac tent in the flattish glacier valley at around 6900m below the north face.
The next day we left the tent behind, intending to collect it on our descent, and started climbing the steepening snow and ice slope in the couloir.
At first, on the easier-angled lower section of the gully, we took turns to break trail. Sometimes the thin frozen crust would collapse and we would sink knee deep into the snow, which was very debilitating.
Upward progress was slow with our heavy rucksacks and as the angle of the slope got steeper, we roped up. The couloir, or gully as it would be called in Scotland, was about grade 3 with steeper sections of hard ice. Technically we were in our comfort zone, but approaching 8000m with our hefty rucksacks we had to dig deep into our reserves of stamina.
The weather remained clear and settled and we climbed until late afternoon before stopping at 7850m to hack out two eyrie-like narrow ledges in the 50° snow and ice slope. These uncomfortable perches were all we had to lie on for the night. We had sleeping bags to snuggle into, but covered only by a thin bivi-bag we were still cold when the temperature dropped to -25°C overnight. I was in charge of trying to melt snow for water, balancing the gas burner and half litre pan on the snow slope. This essential but laborious task was made more difficult by copious waves of spindrift, which would periodically roar down from the summit ridge and engulf us. Spindrift is very fine-grained snow like freezing sand, which penetrates every conceivable orifice. I could not keep the stove going in the cascading spindrift and we had to survive the night on minimal fluids. Several times during the night Steve mentioned that his feet were cold. I massaged and wriggled my toes most of the night. It was more a torture session than rest and recuperation as we suffered and shivered through the freezing bleak night.
Enjoying milky tea with Tibetan yak herders, at Base Camp. In the background are Artur Hajzer and Lech Korniszewski.
Artur Hajzer and Jerzy Kukuczka at Camp 1. Note the debris from a large slab avalanche. This is where, early in the expedition, our two small tents, with us inside them, were nearly wiped out.
As soon as it was light we packed our rucksacks, anxious to leave our tiny, joyless ledges, but we were determined to summit. The final section of the couloir was steep and rocky in places before we broke out onto the ridge at about 8000m. There we found tracks in the snow left by Jurek and Artur who had climbed their new route to the top the previous day. Seeing the footprints in the snow allowed us to be less anxious, as we now had a trail to follow, however the climbing still needed concentration and we could not relax. It was no bimble. We were on a narrow, airy ridge and on both sides there was a thousand metre drop – no place to become complacent.
Steve mentioned his cold feet again, but wanted to push on. I continued scrunching and wriggling my toes at every gruelling step. We toiled up a steep knife-edged snow arête to the Central summit, from where a long and beautiful snow ridge stretched for over a kilometre to the main summit. It was getting late in the day. We were tired, bordering on exhaustion after climbing difficult technical terrain since dawn, but somehow we knew that we had enough in reserve to reach the summit. We pushed on, following Jurek and Artur’s tracks in the snow. It was nice to think that Jurek had climbed his final 8000m peak.
Working our way along
