Quest for Adventure by Chris Bonington

Author:Chris Bonington [Bonington, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911342717
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

– Chapter 10 –

Diamir: Messner on Nanga Parbat

The first complete solo ascent of an 8,000-metre peak

Only the gentle roar of the gas stove disturbed the silence. The tent, with its chill moss of hoar frost festooning the walls, was sepulchral in the dim, grey light of the dawn. Yet it had a reassuring, womb-like quality, for those thin walls protected him from the lonely immensity of the sky and mountains outside. And then another noise intruded; an insistent, rushing, hissing rumble that came from all around him. It sounded like a gigantic flood about to engulf his shelter. Panic stricken, he tore at the iced-up fastenings of the entrance to see what was happening. The whole mountain seemed to be on the move, torrents of ice pouring down on either side, while below him the entire slope, which he had climbed the previous day, had now broken away and was plunging in a great, tumbling, boiling wave to the glacier far below, reaching out and down towards the little camp at its foot where he had left his two companions.

And then the sound died away. A cloud of snow particles, looking no more substantial than Huffy cumulus on a summer’s day, settled gently, and it was as if the avalanche had never happened, the icy debris merging into the existing snow and ice. Once again, the only sound was the purr of the gas stove. Somehow it emphasised his smallness, inconsequence, the ephemeral nature of his own existence.

Reinhold Messner was at a height of around 6,400 metres on the Diamir Face of Nanga Parbat. Having set out the previous morning from a bivouac at the foot of the face, he was attempting the first solo ascent of a major Himalayan peak, all the way from its foot to the summit. It meant complete self-sufficiency, carrying all his food and equipment with him, facing the physical and mental stresses of high-altitude climbing on his own, also facing the risk of accident, of falling down a hidden crevasse, with no one to help him.

Although he could see the site of his Base Camp, some 2,000 metres below and eight kilometres away, he was as much alone as a solitary sailor in the Southern Ocean or as isolated as an astronaut in orbit on the other side of the moon. That sense of isolation was now even more extreme; his line of descent having been swept away by the avalanche, he would have to find another way back down the mountain.

Others had, of course, reached Himalayan summits on their own. Hermann Buhl had made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat in a solitary push – an incredible achievement, but he had been part of a large expedition which had worked together to reach the top camp. It was just the final, if most challenging, step that he had to make on his own – a very different concept from that of starting at the foot by oneself. Some had tried. In 1934 Maurice

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