Himalayan Adventures- Books About Conquest, Triumph and Tragedy

Mt. Nanda Devi, Kumaon Himalayas

The note in the autographed page simply read “To Anindo with love”, and was signed, “Bear”. 

I managed to jump the queue of nearly 70 people lining up to meet him at the IBM conference on that summers’ day in St. Louis, Missouri. He was taller than I had imagined him, and lean! The shy smile on his face betrayed his discomfort of getting attention from so many hundreds of people thronging at the conference to hear him speak. He was a new celebrity those days in 2005 after the success of his new adventure show, “Man vs. Wild”, on Discovery Channel! Bear Grylls’ book “The Kid Who Climbed Everest” was my first book on mountain literature, and more specifically, Himalayan literature, and I was hooked! 

The owner of the conference bookstore was my customer and he made sure that not only would I be at the head of the queue to get my book signed, I would also get a free copy of the book. I was thrilled!! I did not realise then what impact Bear Grylls would have in getting me started on my own Himalayan adventures.

It was only two years later that I finally had the time to read the book. I was back in India in 2007, planning my next career move and really excited at the opportunity of returning to my beloved Himalayas. My parents had gotten me hooked to the mountains after spending at least one vacation there every year during my school and college days. It was the Himalayas I missed the most when I moved to the US and I would look at images on the Internet and read articles on Himalayan travel from various magazines like Outdoors during my business trips. I would regularly pick up National Geographic magazines at every opportunity from Hudson News hoping that I would get to read a new article on the Himalayas each time.

My good friend, Karen Allanson, gifted me my second book on Himalayan adventure, “In the Himalayas: Journeys Through Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan” by Jeremy Bernstein. I was driven to read this book even before the book by Bear because it talked about a land, its people and culture that time had forgotten. So many tourists travel to the Himalayas to look at its beauty, but most of them completely miss out on the culture and thriving communities of the land, whose people are so hospitable and welcoming, that they do everything to share their lives to assist others who merely want to travel through.

And then I read the third book on the Himalayas that would change me forever, would turn my love for the Himalayas into an obsession. I bought a copy of “Nanda Devi, A Journey to the Last Sanctuary”. In it I read about an author’s passion for a mountain, writing a book about her beauty, what drove him to give up everything he had to fulfill a life’s dream of seeing this mountain, of journeying across continents, inhospitable terrain, forbidding tropical rainforests, navigating impenetrable mountain rivers, just for that one chance to gaze up at a mountain that redefined beauty. Hugh Thomson’s account of his journey to the last sanctuary, the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, fulfilled me like no book had ever done before. I read it in three days, and then re-read it again, and again.  

Mt. K2, The World's Second Highest Mountain

What Hugh Thomson did was to set me on a journey of identifying the myth around each mountain, what the people felt about them, the unique local cultural ecosystem that evolved around each peak, so gigantic in size that they developed their own unique story. The travels through the terrifying Karakorams, a mountain range different from the Himalayas, whose people are more closely related to the Persians and the Greeks than to the Tibetans. Ed Viesturs’ death-defying conquest of K2, perhaps the second most deadly mountain in the world to climb, and the world's second highest peak after Everest.  He wrote the brilliant book on mountaineering, “K2-Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain”, cataloging the complexity of climbing a Himalayan peak. The enormous amount of time of up to six months, sometimes, that one has to spend camped at the base camp to acclimatize. The terrible loss that one feels when a colleague dies on the mountain and the pain felt when mountaineers often have to climb over frozen dead bodies of former climbers who perished in their attempts.

However, while Ed Viesturs, as a passionate mountaineer, often recollects his experiences of seeing death a bit mechanically due to his drive for the conquest of a mountain, (and, to be fair, he had seen too much of it) it is Bear Grylls’ accounts as an adventurer and an amateur climber that really hit the chilling reality home. When Bear successfully climbed Everest he was one of the youngest persons at the time to climb the world’s highest mountain. He writes, just a few steps away from the top, deep in the zone of death....

“I knew exactly where I would see him, I had read the accounts of Rob’s tragic death up here many times. They proved right. Slumped and half hidden by the passing of two years, his frozen body sat in its immortal grave. Since that final appeal from his wife over the radio, where Rob had tried with all his being to stand up and climb these ten feet over the summit, he had sat here. Time up here stands still. The cold ensures this…….He had died where he now sat, only ten feet to my left……I knew that we would see various corpses up here, yet somehow nothing had prepared me for the sight.”

The tragedy on that fateful day in 1996 on Mt. Everest when one of the most experienced and brilliant mountaineers, the New Zealander, Rob Hall, died on Everest along with another guide and a couple of clients, is beautifully chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s book, “Into Thin Air”, which I read in 2011. Everest does not spare even the most experienced! Rob Hall had successfully summited Everest 5 times and he died on his sixth attempt on the world’s highest mountain. Rob faced a lot of criticism for trying to commercialize Everest expeditions, making a lot of money in return, but the mountain ultimately won under tragic circumstances. That fateful night, shortly after midnight on May 10, 1996, some 33 climbers were attempting to summit and 15 died on the mountain, including Hall and fellow guide, Scott Fischer.

Mt. Annapurna, the 10th Highest Mountain

I turned my attention to Annapurna, the world’s tenth highest mountain and, arguably its deadliest. One in three people die attempting to climb her, even today. Annapurna, located in West Nepal, was the first 8000-meter peak to be conquered by a French team led by Maurice Herzog in 1952. The climb was controversial as Herzog made an attempt to glorify it in his famous book, “Annapurna-The First Conquest of an 8000-Metre Peak”, as a magnificent example of French heroism and teamwork against all odds thrown at them by nature. But it hid deep dissent within the team, with accusations of malicious attempts to legally stifle internal strife coming from other members in his team like Louis Lachenal, Lionel Terray and Gaston Rebuffat. The book itself makes for hard reading, as it’s a translation from French, but David Roberts’ book “True Summit-What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna”, gives a superb account of what truly transpired, not just during the climb, but also during the planning stages in France, and the aftermath when the climbers returned to a hero’s welcome to a country decimated by the war and in desperate need of rebuilding their national pride.

I continue to read about the Himalayas. Percival Landon’s “Lhasa”, cataloging Sir Francis Younghusband’s pioneering exploratory journey of discovery across the remote and forbidden Tibetan plateau, sits on my bookshelf. The accounts are often about British and European supremacy and thoroughly racist, but very revealing in how Tibetan culture was perceived by the Colonials. What’s also revealing is how much influence the Chinese had on Tibet, often controlling the Dalai Lama, movement of goods and services into the region, as well as setting up of local commerce. Chinese “controllers” were everywhere in Tibet in the early 19th century, limiting the movement of Younghusband’s convoy across the desolate plateau. The Tibetans themselves were unwelcoming of the British and would often attack the party. But superior firearms and firepower in possession of the Colonial party made for limited casualties.

I have read several more books on the Himalayas but Bear Gryll’s and Hugh Thomson’s books remain my favorites.  They talked about beauty in the Himalayas and not of conquest. Viestures’ and Krakuer’s books are classic documentations of conquest and tragedy, both words deeply intertwined in Himalayan adventure. Death seems to be a part of life in this region and everyone venturing there reads about it, often experiencing it first hand. The yearly news about a new tragedy, be it on Everest or Annapurna, as it happened in 2014, will only increase in frequency as more adventurers, often inexperienced, venture deeper into uncharted territory. But what it will give me is the chance to simply do what I love the most. Curl up and read another book about another new adventure in the Himalayas.   

Mt. Annapurna IV