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Shishapangma Expedition

The Alpine Style First Ascent of the Southwest Face

Scott Doug


Editeur - Casa editrice

Mountaineers Books

  Asia
Himalaya
Tibet


Città - Town - Ville

London, Seattle, Leicester

Anno - Date de Parution

2000

Pagine - Pages

322

Lingua - language - langue

eng


Shishapangma Expedition Shishapangma Expedition  

The avalanche deaths of climbers Alex Lowe and Dave Bridges have renewed attention to Tibet's 8,027-meter Shisha Pangma and past climbs on its sheer, glacial faces. One of the more infamous is the 1982 ascent by Alex McIntyre, Doug Scott, and Roger Baxter-Jones, who summited from the unclimbed southwest face. Open to foreign tourists for less than four years, Tibet had been hobbled by the military presence of the Chinese, and the resulting communist bureaucratic minefield proved more formidable, at times, than the mountain. For two years, Scott, McIntyre, Nick Prescott, Elaine Brook, and Paul Braithwaite struggled with paperwork and revolving regulations. Meetings with mountaineering officials in Lhasa turned into maddening nights of drinking rancid tea and arguing through interpreters. Food was scarce and frequently spoiled, the yaks issued to the team were sick, and personalities in the group clashed intensely by the time they reached base camp.
By the acclimatization climb to Nyanang Ri, at 7,071 meters, two of the original six team members were on their way out. "I'm sorry, but charity ends at 5,000 meters," McIntyre tells Nick Prescott, the least experienced of the climbers. Indeed, McIntyre is on a summit mission to be stalled by no one, and Scott, in his trademark philosophical approach to mountaineering, tries to make peace between the group's remaining members. But a second acclimatization climb on 7,445-meter Pungpa Ri hastens the division, as Scott questions his own age and lack of ice skills, while McIntyre and Baxter-Jones leave him in their frozen dust. It isn't until their summit attempt that harmony seems possible and the three set out in ideal conditions. By morning, however, Scott is coughing up blood, Baxter-Jones is vomiting his meal of rotten fish, and McIntyre, who is irrepressibly itchy to move ahead, barely dodges a falling rock (an ominous omen, as he would die from a rock strike only two months later). But the trio still manages to summit flawlessly in light alpine form, lending support to Prescott's wise summation: "Mountains are all about decisions. The climbing is the easy part."

Anyone looking for an Annapurna-style drama may be disappointed with this straightforward account told in interchanging entries by McIntyre and Scott, but readers who savor a realistic description of the misery, personal discord, and sudden catharsis that define high-altitude climbing will feel duly sated by Scott's wizened reflections and McIntyre's technical detail.

 


Recensione in altra lingua (English):

This adventure classic captures everything from the historical to the deeply personal in a gripping account of an ambitious first ascent of the Southwest Face of Shishapangma. As Alex MacIntyre describes it, "To climb it became an ambition, but not just to climb it, we had to make the ascent with style, as light, as fast, as uncluttered as we dared, free from umbilical cords and logistics, with none of the traditional trappings of a Himalayan climb. The wall was the ambition, the style became the obsession."

Placing the expedition into a historical context, Doug Scott presents a wealth of historical detail about the region while Alex MacIntyre provides a unique commentary on the "big peak" way of life-from the frenzied preparations to the clashes of personality, the affection, and the humor



Biografia

Scott Doug

Doug Scott was born in Nottingham in 1941.
Over the last 40 years he has made dozens of first and notable ascents all over the world - including 45 expeditions to the high mountains of Asia.
In 1976 he broke both his legs near the summit of the 24,000ft (7,315m) Ogre in the Karakoram and had to make an agonising eight-day crawl back to base camp.
Scott has climbed less regularly since having two knee replacements and he is soon to have his one of his ankles fused - the legacy of his injuries from the Ogre accident.
Most of his time is taken up working as operations director of Community Action Nepal - a charity which sets up health, education and clean water projects in the country - but he also continues to lecture about his climbs.
He lives in Scotland.

Consulta anche: Biografia ed altro dalla BBC