In Only Two for Everest: How a first ascent by Riddiford and Cotter shaped climbing history
By Lyn McKinnon
Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2016
RETURN TO MUKUT PARBAT
Although my grandfather Earle died some years before I was born, I grew up hearing his name. Earle’s personality reverberated down the years and through all family stories – Earle the wonderful dancer; Earle the charming flirt; Earle the fastidious gardener; Earle the terrifying driver hurtling down gravel roads; Earle the maverick, buying back the family homestead, only to lose it again; Earle the intrepid and terrible, marching his four children through the hills of Orongorongo, with the injunction that one must never stop, but there was nothing wrong with slowing down. Earle the feckless young lawyer. Earle the mountaineer. Earle the returning hero, courting my grandmother – an achievement that I personally will always view as his greatest, most visionary triumph.
My mother Anna, the storyteller, inherited Earle’s obsession with maps and planning. When this book was planned, she began to dream of a Himalayan journey of her own, one retracing the steps of the 1951 Garhwal expedition – the journey on which Earle, Ed Cotter and Pasang Dawa Lama summited Mukut Parbat.
My mother’s expedition party in September 2015 included me, my younger sister Oonagh (15), our uncle Richard (Earle’s second child), Richard’s sons Freddy (21) and Sam (18), and Anna Cook and her husband Dave McFall. Anna Cook is a New Zealand guide and alpine skier. While she acted as lead organiser, we also travelled with two Indian guides – Mayank, who worked for World Expeditions India, and Badri, a local guide, the last known person to have been up on the Chamrao Glacier approach to Mukut Parbat. Our cooks were Jeet, Padam, Sontos and Veejay.
Following a journey by train and car from Delhi to Rishikesh, the first trek was over the Kuari Pass from the damp town of Ghat to Joshimath. Kuari Pass is a beautiful alpine trail through woodsy villages and beautiful country: dark and handsome forest with silver beech, rhododendrons and a moss carpet, broken up by rock paths shining with mica, and bare green hillside that doesn’t roll so much as bounce – up and down, up and down. In September–October, the land is bountiful. The terraced farms of the villages are abundant too – bright with beans, tomatoes, corn, cabbages, peppers and millet. The crops allow the villages to be self sufficient, trading produce for power. In the winter, in the snow, many villages are vacated.
Our luggage and supplies were carried on Kuari Pass by a team of mules and ponies accompanied by a group of local horsemen. From Joshimath we drove to Badrinath, pilgrim city, and from there to Chamroa Nala, camping there before walking up to the base of Mukut Parbat, assisted by 22 porters. We stayed at our ‘base camp’ for three nights, making day trips out from there.
I didn’t fully understand what the journey meant until we came face to face with the mountains themselves, the range stretching from the mighty Nilkanth in the north to Nanda Devi in the southeast. It was late morning and the mountains were shockingly blue and white – and vastly high. We sat on the grass and tilted our heads back, like an audience in the front row of a 3D movie. Badri, waving his long walking stick, named the peaks for us: You are Nilkantha, you are Arwa Tower, you are Kamet, you are Ghoni, you are Ghoda, you are Hathi, you are Barmai, you are Sona Ganghri, you are Rishi, you are Dronagiri, you are Kalanka, you are Nanda Devi …
And where is Mukut Parbat? we asked.
Badri squinted. There! Peeking out behind Kamet’s left shoulder, over a long white bib of glacier, was our parbat – the mountain Earle, Ed Cotter and Pasang had climbed first. Their mountain.
The mountains, out on their morning parade, felt utterly foreign to me. Not an alienating foreignness – an awe-inspiring one. Like mountains everywhere, including ours in Aotearoa, the Himalayan peaks have distinct identities. Nanda Devi, in particular, is special. She is the patron deity of the Garhwal region. Gazing up at the mountain, Dave reminded us of the ill-fated Nanda Devi expedition of 1976, on which a young woman named after the mountain goddess died 300 metres from the summit. Anna Cook, standing next to me, recalled that she and Ed Cotter were luckier when they skied together in the region in the 1990s, with the mountain looming large in their view.
At that point, my feeling changed. The stories I had heard were alive here in the generations standing beside me. I felt a flooding of profound pride. In the highest region in the world, in the heartland of the world’s oldest living religion, these New Zealanders – largely self-taught enthusiasts – had led big lives. These were my grandfather’s friends, the names on the backs of my grandmother’s photographs. They had known the peaks and ridges of the Himalaya intimately. They had spent hours exploring routes. In the Himalaya, their names mean something.
Although I often found myself breathless and irritable in the thin air, the Kuari Pass trail is easy enough – at its top, cousin Freddy declared the pass ‘a walk in the park’. Not so Mukut Parbat. Up at 5000 metres, the notions of ‘walk’, ‘mile’ and ‘hour’ began to shift and give way, rather like the rocks beneath our feet. While the 1951 mountaineers walked along the valley floor from Mana to Chamrao Nala Glacier, we drove over a rock road winding high above. Even so, we set up our own base camp far below where theirs must have been pitched. Our camp, a silt bed enclosed by a ring of peaked sand dunes, might have been a crater on the moon. The moraine stretched in undulating peaks and troughs across the starkly shaped valley, all the way back to the foot of the mountain. When we compared the valley before us to the photographs from 1951, Dave and Anna hypothesised that the glacier that had formed it had retreated significantly in the last 50 years. Traversing the moraine, we could take hours to cover one kilometre. And those hours started to feel much more exhausting, at least to me. At a mere 5000 metres, I was a spent husk of a mountaineer’s granddaughter.
After three days floundering on the moraine, the sight of Mukut Parbat’s icy col began to seem still more ridiculous than it ever had before, and Earle’s climbing of it more outlandish. He had chosen this place, and organised an exploration of it – on next to no information. There was no Google, no GPS, no World Expeditions India. There was no one they knew who had been here. Out of one German map, Shipton and Tilman’s accounts and his own mountaineering experience in New Zealand, Earle conjured the Himalaya – and conjured a desire for them in himself, and in the people around him.
I knew Earle adored the mountains. But it wasn’t until we started up the moraine that I understood that loving the mountains is not a pleasure, but a necessity of being in them: an option only in the sense that survival is an option. Love is the only condition in which you accept the mountains, and the mountains accept you. Looking up at Mukut Parbat’s treacherous ridgeline, I realised that while they were up there, Earle, Ed, Ed and George must have loved it too. It’s true that later things fell apart. But up there, in the thin air with the loose rocks rolling and tiny red and purple alpine flowers breaking under their cold and heavy hobnail boots, they could only have loved it.
On our last day up the moraine a heavy fog fell as we made our way back to camp. The effect was unsettling. We could have been anywhere. As we neared the campsite, however, we saw the flickering of light. There was my mother standing on a high dune waving her headlamp to guide us home – much as George Lowe waited for Earle and Ed, shining a torch in the darkness. Then en route back to Delhi we stopped in Ranikhet, in the same hotel where the 1951 boys had received the infamous telegram.
As we trekked, all our smaller experiences amplified the larger ones of the ‘51-ers’. The ‘Ganga Ice Shark’ that sliced open cousin Sam’s feet in a frozen river crossing echoed the madness of Earle’s muddy near-drowning. Our tense relationship with our portable toilet throne was a sedate version of Earle’s crippling six-week ‘affliction’. The question of the weather window, the trade of sartorial insults, the bells of the cows and ponies, the local women bent double under towering baskets of grass, the rivulets of chatter and silence in accordance with the steepness of the hills – I think we shared all that with them as well.
We were very happy. And in June 1951, I think they were happy too.