Mysteries of our personalities
Boardman-Tasker part 2: Pete Boardman [1500 words, 6 mins
We’re used to the way people are prepared to die in battle – whether they’re fighting for Ukraine or for Russia. Some are happy to die as martyrs for their religious faith. And many of us would lay down our lives to save our own children.
So is it so surprising that one or two of us are ready to make the supreme sacrifice – for the sake of an especially pure and beautiful way of going up a mountain?
Last week I wrote about the Alpine Style – the ideal of climbing Himalayan big walls straight up, from bottom to top, by a small team carring all their overnight equipment. In the 1970s, the must supreme and stylish team for this sort of thing was Joe Tasker and Peter Boardman.
And, not to spoil the story too much: They lived a lot together… Finally together – they died.1
Looking across from Dunagiri at the end of last week’s episode, Joe Tasker was captivated by the even steeper hill on the other side of the glacier. Changabang. To be climbed, in the Alpine Style, with a team of just two.
His partner Dick Renshaw was still incapacited by the frostbite from that Dunagiri trip. Other climbers weren’t encouraging.
“Preposterous” Chris Bonington
Don Whillans: “Well, there’s three things that could happen. You could fail, you could get up it, or you could not come back.”
“We do feel a team of two climbers attempting a peak like Changabang will be unsafe.” Indian Mountaineering Federation.
"It doesn't look like a married man's route" – Ken Wilson, editor of Climber magazine.
"I'd take an extra jumper" – Doug Scott's way of saying much the same thing. (Adding later: “Ummm – please can I come?” But they’d already got their two-man team.)
The first one who thought it made sense, sort of, was an office worker called Pete Boardman.
While still at grammer school in Stockport near Manchester, Pete Boardman already achieved two of the remaining unclimbed routes in the Alps. He went on to an English degreee (Nottingham Uni) and a teaching diploma; but then became an effective mountaineering administrator, a top executive at both the British Mountaineering Council (BMC) and the Association of British Mountain Guides.
His English-graduate writing style is literary and clean; sometimes lyrical, and just occasionally infected with BMC-speak: “We had no detailed logistical plan, but were preparing for various eventualities.”
As mountain meet-cutes go, he and Joe Tasker were climbing separately on the same climb on Les Droites in the Alps when the weather went off; they combined teams for the epic abseil descent thorugh the blizzard.
The two set off for Changabang (6864m) in the Gharhwal Himalaya in May of 1976. "This climb would be all that I wanted. Something that would be totally committing, that would bring my self-respect into line with the public recognition I had received for [the previous year’s big-expedition climb on the SW Face of] Everest."
The ascent forms a section in Joe Tasker’s ‘Savage Arena’, the fuller account makes up Boardman’s book ‘The Shining Mountain’. There are no obvious discrepancies between the two: bits of Boardman’s one are contributed by Joe anyway.
The ascent would not be a pure Alpine style. They set up Camp 1 at the foot of the difficulties, then spent several days there, fixing rope up steep rock to the mid-way icefield. Joe Tasker was so pure in style that he had never used Jumar clamps, the sliding attachments which are the standard way of hauling yourself up fixed ropes.
Jumaring on thin terylene rope, with a heavy sack, from Camp 1 back up to each previous day’s high point, Boardman would write: “I felt like the lead weight used for testing ropes. And sometimes they snapped –they were made for yachting. What would the BMC Technical Committee think of me?” While Pete is jumaring, a piton comes out. He falls 20ft, to be held on an old rope of Joe’s; fortunately the shock strain didn’t come onto the terylene. “Fun is closely linked to fear. I began to slide the jumars slowly up the rope, trying to avoid any sudden sharp movement.”
Above Camp 2 they spent a night hanging from the ropes in hammocks. A storm came in. “The clouds were boiling up beneath our feet and through them we could see the Rhamani Glacier in the shadow of encroaching darkness. Rishi Kot was shifting moods and colours with the moving clouds and setting sun. The lighting around us had a hypnotic effect.”
They retreated to their base camp on the glacier, were they met an American expedition onto Joe’s mountain of the previous year, Dunagiri (using an easier route than Joe’s one). The guys seemed a bit too old, and their gear too new, all purchased fresh for the expedition. And why were they using icaxe and crampons for a walk along the rubble of the glacier moraine? “If anyone’s going to have an accident it will be them, don't you think?” But Joe Tasker adds: “We knew, however, that these vistiors in their turn probably shared the same view of our efforts on Changabang.”
At this point they’d reached the end of their scheduled stay. Continuing would mean missing their plane home. With no means of communication, their familes would be unbearably anxious when they didn’t appear. Also Pete would lose his job at the BMC. Bearing all this in mind… they decided to continue with the climb.
Camp 2, at the top of the icefield, was a ‘huge ledge’ carved into the ice, big enough to hold almost 3/4 of their tiny tent. Then they started climbing, and fixing ropes, up the upper rockwall.
When it was Pete Boardman’s turn:
I took a few deep breaths and vigorously front-pointed for fifteen feet across the gully until I could brace a foot across a spike and scrape my other crampon against the ice until I was in balance. For me, it was a perfect pitch. Every move was intricate, technical… Every technique I had ever used was tested and applied, half consciously – bridging, jamming, chimneying, lay-backing, mantle-shelfing, finger pulls, pressure holds… This was mixed rock and ice-climbing at its finest. I felt in perfect control and knew the thrill of seeing the ropes from my waist curl down through empty space. Speak with your eyes, speak with your hands, let it all flow from your heart.”
The top, as they say, is only half way. To get down would take them two days of dangerous abseiling, with Boardman’s fingers damaged by frostbite. Never mind. “Even if we died now, we had proved that it was not impossible to climb such a route as the West Face of Changabang.” (Tasker)
They descend to meet a large group of Italians led up the wrong glacier by their guides, and among them a single climber from the Dunagiri team. She’d spent two days on the face, alone, after all four companions, including her husband, fell to their deaths.
Although exhausted after 2 months on their climb, Tasker and Boardman take on the task of retrieving the bodies, photographing them as a record of their deaths, and burying them in a crevasse. With former seminarian Joe Tasker, though now a convinced atheist, fulfilling that priestly role as well as conforting the bereaved widow.
There followed an Alpine-style Kangchenjunga (May 1979) with Doug Scott and one other, and no oxygen. (In their highest snowhole, around 8000m, the three mountain writers argued about their reading matter – no nice lightweight Kindles in 1979.) And they kept at it: Gauri Sankar, an unsuccessful 4-man attempt on K2, and Kongur with Chris Bonington and others.
In May 1982, Pete Boardman, Joe Tasker, Joe’s earlier partner Dick Renshaw and an ageing Chris Bonington2, headed along with two support climbers towards Everest. Everest, not by either of its tourist routes but via its unclimbed North-East Ridge. Three snow hole caves led up to the Pinnacles, the crux of the climb at around the 8000m mark. If those could be passed, they would then join the top section of George Mallory’s North Ridge route for the Third Step and the summit pyramid.
But could the Pinnacles be climbed? After 14 hours of climbing on their third day, Boardman and Tasker were seen just below the second one. They were never seen again. More details of the climb are on the Boardman-Tasker website.3
Expedition member Charlie Clarke later wrote: “I believe that with the mysteries of our personalities, our curious drives and our self-appointed goals, we could not have turned down this opportunity for fulfilment without denying ourselves a glimpse of the very meaning of existence. In time I expect we shall do the same again.”
'Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde’ Songwriters: Mitch Murray / Peter Callander 1968
Bonington was a few months short of his 50th birthday.
The route would be climbed using ‘siege tactics’ and lots of fixed ropes by Japanese climbers with 35 supporting Sherpas in 1994.
Thanks for your helpful article Joe Tasker and Peter Boardman were brave men for their alpine style climbs