Above the Clouds by Anatoli Boukreev

Author:Anatoli Boukreev
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250097484
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

7

THE ROADS WE CHOOSE, 19951

DHAULAGIRI, FALL 1995

The summer of 1995 was spent working for Himalayan Guides in the Tien Shan. Simon Yates, Henry Todd’s wife, Peta Waite, and I led the first British expedition to traverse Myramornya Stena. Three of the team went on to summit Khan-Tengri.

That fall I was committed to a Manaslu expedition that was to be our Sports Club’s return to Himalayan climbing. Our intention was to tackle a new route on the difficult South Face. In 1990, on one of the last attempts to blaze that futuristic trail, our teammates Grigori Luniakov, Zinur Halitov, and Marat Galiev had died in their pioneering efforts. This climb was conceived as a tribute to those men. The permit had been purchased from the Nepal Ministry of Tourism in 1994. Subsequent organization had been stymied by the club’s inability to raise money for the expensive first ascent. When Simon, Peta, and I arrived in Almaty after the Khan-Tengri expedition, I learned the Manaslu project had been put on the shelf once again. The Kazakhstan Ministry of Tourism had reneged on its funding commitment. Irvand Illinski had been forced to postpone the expedition until the spring of 1996. This depressing news came about one week before the beginning of the autumn climbing season in Nepal.

It was too late for me to find work on any of the commercial expeditions heading into the Himalayas, but I went to Kathmandu anyway, hoping I might turn up an affordable opportunity to try some peak I had not climbed. Fortuitously I hooked up with a team of Georgian climbers who had a permit for Dhaulagiri; this was their first Himalayan expedition since the collapse of the Soviet Union. I knew these men from sports climbing in the 1980s; they were members of the military sports club in Georgia, coached by one of my old mentors, Lev Sarkisian. My friends did not need my expertise for their undertaking, but they provided me with an interesting personal opportunity. I paid a portion of the permit fee and other expedition costs and shared the work required to establish high camps during our acclimatization. My summit attempt, a solo climb, posed complex physical and tactical problems that were challenging to me as an extreme athlete. Alone, I had to count on my strength and intuition; my chances of success and survival depended on these.

My goal was to climb Dhaulagiri in less than twenty-four hours. I left Base Camp on October 7 at six-thirty in the evening and reached Camp I at 5,700 meters at 9 P.M. After resting for twenty minutes, I moved on. Gusts of wind scoured the site of Camp II. I paused with a group of Austrian mountaineers weathering the blasts in their tents. Ignoring my momentary doubts about the wisdom of continuing, at 2 A.M. I headed toward Camp III. The wind and the night cold slowed my pace significantly. Often I stopped and waited for violent gusts of the icy blast to subside. When I arrived at Camp III at 5:45 A.

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