The Last Blue Mountain: The great Karakoram climbing tragedy

Contents

Introduction to the 2020 Edition by Ed Douglas

Foreword to the 1959 Edition by Lord Hunt

Author’s Note

Chapter 1 – Haramosh

Chapter 2 – In the Kutwal Valley

Chapter 3 – Above the Haramosh La

Chapter 4 – Trouble with the Hunzas

Chapter 5 – The Lost Food Dump

Chapter 6 – The Climb to Camp IV

Chapter 7 – The Snow Cave

Chapter 8 – Emery and the Crevasse

Chapter 9 – The Avalanche

Chapter 10 – The Snow Basin

Chapter 11 – The Treacherous Traverse

Chapter 12 – The Tracks Divide

Chapter 13 – Fighting for Life

Chapter 14 – Disintegration

Chapter 15 – Alone at Camp III

Chapter 16 – Last Nights on the Mountain

Afterword

Appendix: ‘The Runcible Cat’ by John Emery

Photographs and Illustrations

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Introduction to the 2020 Edition

Several years ago, I sat in a London crown court listening to a barrister explain to a judge what it was like to be trapped high on a big mountain in the Himalaya in worsening weather, making decisions that would impact not just on one person’s safety but that of a whole team in circumstances of extreme physical hardship and danger. Even after a good night’s rest at sea level, he argued, the brain could be a fickle mechanism. Was it possible to pass judgement on one fatigued by days of effort with minimal rest?

Gradually the court was hushed as the barrister filled out the picture of his client’s situation: the strengthening wind, the snow stinging his face, the fight for breath, the numbing of feet and hands, the psychological pressure of a remote situation, far from the help of others. We were no longer in London but high in the Himalaya, in desperate trouble. I was startled to feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickle with fear and almost laughed: up until then, I thought that was simply a figure of speech.

After the day’s proceedings, I asked a friendly solicitor if the barrister was a climber. He seemed to understand viscerally the situation he was describing; he must have been in similar situations himself. The solicitor laughed. ‘Him? I’m not sure he ever leaves the city, let alone climbs mountains.’ What I’d heard was simply a supreme act of the imagination, the ability to think through the consequences of such a hostile environment on a weary, desperate and vulnerable human being, and communicate that experience with a simple intensity that was almost unbearable.x

Ralph Barker did something similar in The Last Blue Mountain, his memorable account of an attempt in 1957 by a group mostly of students from Oxford University on the Karakoram peak of Haramosh, an adventure that ended in a protracted and ultimately fatal misadventure whose twists and turns heaped agonies on top of each other. That anyone survived it at all is testament to the courage, resilience and good luck of the two who escaped: the medical student John Emery, and the soldier Tony Streather, an experienced hand brought in to win approval for the enterprise. Streather’s ascent of Kangchenjunga two years earlier had made him something of a celebrity. Barker’s version of their story, told for a general audience, is in the same genre as Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void, now a much more famous book, which in the 1980s helped reinvigorate a similar strand of narrative non-fiction that Barker was drawing on at the end of the 1950s. Think of Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape.

Joe Simpson of course was his own subject, had lived through his own epic and could look hard into his own soul for the meaning and direction of the story he was telling. Ralph Barker hadn’t been on Haramosh or any other mountain; like the barrister in court he had to rely on his own imagination, judgement and empathy to unravel the contrasting motivations and personalities of the climbers and the complex sequence of events on the mountain. The first three-quarters of The Last Blue Mountain moves along crisply, setting the scene, offering concise portraits of the climbers and their mountain; but it is all preparation and context for the intense conclusion as these climbers we have come to know and like are faced with unimaginable odds. The book’s great strength is the way Barker, without ever drifting from his fast-paced narrative, shows how character and fate intertwine.

Some aspects now feel a little dated. It is unquestionably a male book: inevitably given that all the protagonists are men. And the author does on a few occasions dip into language that will make some modern readers flinch a little. But despite how tight-lipped 1950s England was supposed xito have been, Barker had a liberal rein to use diaries and letters to lift the tough carapace on these men and expose a more complex version of themselves: their frailties as well as their strengths. He does this with an unfailing sympathy that prevents him from being too abrupt in his judgements. Men have died, and he is respectful of the loss others have suffered. If mistakes were made, then they were understandable and are more than offset by the sacrifice and courage of all involved. It is this combination of openness and respect that has secured the book’s survival, as much as its thrilling tale.

All the protagonists are well drawn: the hugely likeable Kiwi Rae Culbert, the not-so-quiet American Scott Hamilton and the impressive John Emery. (All those I have spoken to about Emery, all old men now, speak of him with great fondness and respect.) But Barker zeroes in, correctly I think, on the differences between the expedition’s leader, Tony Streather, an Army officer with immense stamina, and the project’s driving force, an ambitious young climber from Huddersfield, ‘very much of the Buhl temperament’, called Bernard Jillott, whose climbing partners at Oxford included the young educationalist Colin Mortlock. Streather had come to prominence in a series of expeditions to big mountains, starting with the first ascent of Tirich Mir in Chitral, where he had ‘stayed on’ after independence and the risks he faced daily on the frontier gave him a depth of experience that his teammates, who weren’t that much younger, couldn’t possibly match. He loved Pakistan, and the expedition to Haramosh was an opportunity to renew friendships. He also understood the Hunza men who worked as porters on the expedition, their limitations and expectations, in a way that Jillott, who was driven and impulsive, did not. These two, with such different backgrounds and temperaments, would chafe against each other.

Barker may not have had experience of mountains but he understood men under pressure. After a stint on the Sporting Life, he had gone into banking before joining the RAF. He served as a wireless operator and gunner in a Beaufort torpedo bomber squadron attacking Axis shipping xiiin the Mediterranean that was resupplying Rommel’s Panzers in the Western Desert: a notoriously risky occupation in such an unreliable aircraft. When Barker’s crashed, killing the pilot and navigator, he returned to Britain and spent the rest of the war flying transport aircraft.

Demobbed in 1946, Barker struggled to find meaningful work and consequently re-enlisted in the RAF two years later. He was sent to Berlin during the airlift as a press officer and spent a few more years in Germany with the British Forces Network before returning to work on official war narratives at the Air Ministry. What he learned there would nourish his later career as a full-time writer. A chance remark from a colleague about the Goldfish Club, founded to reunite those serving airmen who had crash-landed ‘in the drink’ and survived, gave him the idea for his first book. His next described the wartime role of the torpedo bomber squadrons he had served.

How Barker swerved from military history to write The Last Blue Mountain, his third book and on an entirely new subject, is something of a mystery. Bernard Jillott, Barker tells us, was planning to write a book, so perhaps Barker inherited this project. Perhaps his military service made the connection with Streather, but that is simply a guess. Why the climbers trusted him is also intriguing. There was, and to some extent remains, a deep-seated antipathy among climbers to non-climbing third parties writing about mountaineering tragedies. In later life Barker concentrated on military aviation, survival and his other great passion, cricket, which he played for Adastrians, a team for ex-RAF servicemen, and El Vino’s. He died aged ninety-three in 2011.

Of course, Barker’s version of this extraordinary expedition is simply that: a version, albeit a compelling one. As someone who has also written about other people’s mountaineering tragedies, I’m only too aware that for a general audience in particular, even a well-informed one, narratives are sometimes simplified, or someone’s strongly held views contradicted. When John Emery, having qualified as a doctor despite suffering appalling xiiiamputations to his hands and feet, died in a fall from the Weisshorn in 1963 aged just twenty-nine, his obituarist in the Climbers’ Club Journal observed that the best account of the Haramosh expedition had come from Emery’s own lips. None of which detracts from this classic of climbing literature: it is an epic story well told.

Accuracy is one thing, truth another. The title of the book, The Last Blue Mountain, was the suggestion of Tony Streather’s wife Sue. The phrase is drawn from the final lines of James Elroy Flecker’s play Hassan and spoken by a pilgrim; it captures the romance of mountaineering. (An earlier phrase from the same verse, ‘Always a little further’, was the title for Alastair Borthwick’s classic memoir of climbing in Scotland in the 1930s.) The closing lines of the play, however, add a more thoughtful perspective. The watchman at the gate the pilgrims have just passed through tries to console the women who watch them go. ‘What would ye, ladies?’ he says. ‘It was ever thus. / Men are unwise and curiously planned.’ One of the women then says: ‘They have their dreams, and do not think of us.’ Except that Tony Streather spent long days in his tent on Haramosh, sheltering from the foul Karakoram weather, thinking of Sue and their young son, and questioning the wisdom of their enterprise and the choices they had made. Such questions would haunt him until his death, aged ninety-two, in 2018.

Ed Douglas

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Foreword to the 1959 Edition

We are living in an age which, more than ever, judges an enterprise by the tangible result; judged by this yardstick the attempt by British climbers on Haramosh in 1957 was a tragic failure. That those who reach their goal and return safely have, in an immediate and obvious sense, succeeded is not disputed; but what of others who make the journey without, in the analogy of Cervantes, reaching the inn? What of the Polar party in 1912, and of Mallory and Irvine on Everest in 1924? Did these men, and many others, necessarily fail?

The matter deserves a deeper scrutiny. The true result of endeavour, whether on a mountain or in any other context, may be found rather in its lasting effects than in the few moments during which a summit is trampled by mountain boots. The real measure is the success or failure of the climber to triumph not over a lifeless mountain but over himself: the true value of the enterprise lies in the example to others of human motive and human conduct.

Accidents are never to be sought in mountaineering. I am not encouraging them by saying that the greatness of this sport rests mainly in the risk of their happening. If we ever succeed in making climbing safe from danger, we had better give it up for something which retains the element of hazard. When an accident occurs, something may emerge of lasting value, for the human spirit may rise to its greatest heights. This happened on Haramosh.

From this truer viewpoint, this story is not one of failure but of triumph.

Lord Hunt KG, CBE, DSO

Leader of the British expedition to Everest in 1953 and author of The Ascent of Everest

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Author’s Note

To write the story of an expedition of this kind is to feel the growth of a deep admiration and affection for the men who took part in it. To be entrusted with such a task was a great privilege. I was allowed to see and study the personal diaries of the climbers, in which from day to day they recorded their innermost thoughts about the expedition, about each other, and about themselves. I was able to discuss every aspect of the expedition with two of the survivors, and to correspond fully with a third.

I would like the reader to know of and share my admiration for their courage in deciding, within a few weeks of their tragic and terrible experience, that a non-mountaineer, unknown to any member of the expedition, should tell their story.

Ralph Barker

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1

– CHAPTER 1 –

Haramosh

It had been easy, back in England, contemplating the Himalaya from a distance, with the bigger peaks of Everest, K2 and Kangchenjunga jutting into their minds, to think of their mountain, the 24,270-foot Haramosh, as being something within their compass, a mountain just about their size. And even now, as they camped in the hairpin arena of the high Kutwal Valley, 11,000 feet above sea level, hemmed in on all sides by mountains like a monstrous dry-dock, it was impossible to realise that facing them, a mile across the boulder-strewn Mani glacier, the north face of Haramosh, four miles long, soared and tumbled a further 13,000 feet into the sky.

Confronted by such a giant, surrounded by its kind if not by its equals, one’s eye had no point of reference with remembered heights.

To Bernard Jillott, twenty-three-year-old organiser and deputy leader of the expedition, it seemed that some of those rock ridges that crinkled up from the base of the mountain like the pleats of a skirt might be climbed in a morning, before the sun loosened the chaotic ice cliffs that overhung every inch of the north face and sent avalanches of snow and ice billowing down the mountainside on to the glacier, destroying anything that loitered in their path. His mountaineer’s eye, unaccustomed to the Himalaya, saw the problem momentarily on an Alpine scale. He ran his eye up the most 2prominent ridge until it reached the forehead of ice cliffs below the summit. It looked a climb of 3,000 feet, no more. But from the known height of the summit above the valley it must be about 8,000 feet, needing at least three camps on the ridge itself, each one of which would be swept away from above almost before it was pitched.

And yet it looked easy. It seemed that the eye, like the camera lens, could not focus on so immense a subject without taking a metaphorical step back to get the whole in its aperture, reducing it as it did so to snapshot size.

For Jillott, the sight of Haramosh piling up in front of him was very much more than a challenge, real and urgent as the challenge was. It was the fulfilment of an ambition that had been conceived more than a year earlier, in 1956, when he was still president of the Oxford University Mountaineering Club. It was the realisation, though, of very much more than a single ambition. It was the fulfilment of his whole being.

Although tall and lithe, he had never been much of an athlete at school. In his work, of course, he had always been top, right through his grammar school days. Never anything but first. He got used to it and he liked it. But he had had no ability or zest for team games, and this coupled with his superiority as a scholar had tended to isolate him. An only child, inclined to be quiet and shy, he did not make friends easily. The only game he played well was tennis, which suited his liking for a personal struggle. He relished the opportunity for short, sharp conquest, complete in itself, that each point offered.

Exercise and companionship, and the beauty of mountain scenery, had been his early incentives to climb. At school he had organised parties to the Lake District, walking rather than climbing, and these episodes had become more and more important to him. Then, during National Service in the Army, stationed at Inverness, he had started rock climbing. Soon he was getting an elation from success in a hard climb that nothing else in life had ever given him.3

When he won his scholarship to Oxford, he had joined the mountaineering club. He had given all his spare time to climbing. It had become a religion. He began to attempt the more difficult rock climbs. Soon he was making a name for himself. He was impatient to attempt new routes, to solve fresh problems, to know the explorer’s excitement in untrodden ways.

He discovered that climbing, supposedly non-competitive, could be among the most keenly competitive of sports. Soon he had two Alpine first ascents to his credit. He began to hear his name mentioned as one of the most promising rock climbers in the country. There was only one major field in which he was still untested – the Himalaya. It was inevitable that thoughts of an expedition – his own expedition, but with an experienced Himalayan climber invited to lead – should press themselves upon him.

It was then that he had thought of Tony Streather. To get the right backing for his expedition, moral and financial, he must capture some big name in mountaineering as leader. Yet he had to choose a man whose approach to climbing was essentially amateur – someone who would be interested in taking a small expedition to an unclimbed but little-known peak just for the fun of it, without the publicity which accompanied a big expedition to a famous mountain.

Streather, he had decided, would satisfy both these requirements. He was without doubt in the very front rank as a Himalayan climber. He had climbed Tirich Mir with the Norwegians in 1950, and had been with the Americans on K2 in 1953, standing up to the disastrous fall better than almost anyone else, and subsequently helping to lead the exhausted party down. In 1955 he had gone to the top of Kangchenjunga, then the highest unclimbed peak in the world, inferior in height only to Everest and K2. And as a regular Army officer, his amateur approach to climbing was sure. The shunning of publicity and heroics would be ingrained in him.4

These were the sort of thoughts that had passed through Jillott’s mind during the summer of 1956. He had sought advice at Oxford on the possibility of gaining support for a University expedition, combining the mapping and exploration of a little-known area with the scaling of a significant peak. From several suggested possibilities he had selected Haramosh, mainly because of its accessibility. Although Haramosh was nearly a thousand miles north-east of Karachi, they could travel by air as far as Gilgit, forty miles west of Haramosh, leaving a day’s ride by Jeep to the road-head at Sussi and then two days on foot to the Kutwal Valley and the Mani glacier. They could encompass the journey, the survey, and a worthwhile attempt at an ascent, in the long vacation.

Jillott had invited Streather to Oxford to talk to the mountaineering club about K2, and he had broached the subject after the lecture. Streather was just the sort of man he had expected – modest and reserved but free from shyness or diffidence, tremendously compact, and exuding physical and mental fitness. For all Streather’s gentle manner there was an unmistakable vitality and robustness about him. His reaction to Jillott’s proposal had been one of quiet but genuine interest, and Jillott was enormously encouraged. He felt at once that he could take Streather at his word.

Then there was the question of finding a team. Jillott’s years in mountaineering had changed him from an unknown young man with few friends to a popular climber with many. Modest and unassuming, he had a great ability for getting on with people. Even so, in the choice of his team he was restricted to those members of the mountaineering club who could find both the money and the time. Each member of the team was asked to subscribe £100 to the expedition fund.

Eventually he settled on five men: Streather and himself; Rae Culbert, a twenty-five-year-old New Zealander; John Emery, a twenty-three-year-old medical student from St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington; and Scott Hamilton, an American from Little Rock, Arkansas. All apart from 5Streather were fellow members of the OUMC and personal friends with whom Jillott had climbed.

He had set about the preparatory organisation with what had seemed at the time to be inexhaustible energy and enthusiasm. Throughout the early months of 1956 he had been working hard for his finals, and then had followed a year’s concentrated research. But the mass of detail necessary to the planning of such an expedition was meticulously attended to. By October 1956, plans were ready for submission to the Pakistan Government, without whose permission the expedition would be stillborn. Then there was the money side. The blessing of the Oxford University expedition council was needed, since the magic name of the University meant everything to their requests for financial support. With it, they could hope for a sizeable grant from the Everest Foundation. He remembered now the thrill of pleasure and relief when the Foundation’s promise of help to the tune of £1,200 was made.

Other grants, coupled with book and press contracts, and the generosity of manufacturers in giving supplies of their goods, had more than covered their original budget, so that, apart from Emery, who had accompanied the baggage by sea, they had eventually been able to fly out, saving a commodity