For me the gathering began in Karachi airport where a familiar Sherpa face called out across the check-in queues; It was Mingma, who looked so familiar that I couldn’t place him. Sure that I had not shared an expedition with him, I knew the face. Hiding my inner shame of non-recognition I scanned his face again and again, always with the same result; I should know this man. He looked like a man from Khumbu, but should I guess wrong I would look and sound even more ignorant than I already am. (A note to my friends here; please keep your smirks to yourself). It was not until I carefully gleaned from our intermittent conversation, passing through security checks, that Mingma was indeed from Pangboche, and that he was my friend Gurmin’s brother and that the family likeness was no coincidence that I understood why his face was so familiar.

Matt and Duncan were heading home and I was en route to Cho Oyu after our Great Tango expedition. It had been an interesting trip, laced through with snippets of seemingly connected news. As we left Europe Israel began their short invasion of Lebanon. The incursion was to be measured in hours. They should have guessed the guerrillas would be more intractable than that.

Inspired by their ascent of Amadablam 3 years ago, Matt and Duncan saw in Great Trango a peak of exceptional beauty, a climb difficult enough to be interesting, and of the right height; 6300m. That is to say a mountain climbable in a three week outing London to London.

To make things go quick and smooth we used the agency of Nazir Sabir and hired a lovely Hunza man, Asfar-Jan to help us with loads on the mountain. For our minimal time frame it was essential that we catch the Islamabad to Skardu flight both into and out of the Northern Areas. The flight was a 45 minute affair. The alternative, the KKH (Karakoram Highway) would take 24 hours of driving split over two days, providing there were no landslides. Otherwise it can take a week. It was in fact so important to our plans that we catch the flights that it became inevitable that we would not.

Part of the KKH follows the Indus into the hottest place in north Pakistan, Chillas, where the temperature in the shade was over 40 centigrade and to sleep you have to cover yourself with wet towels. In summer this must be one of the hottest places on earth. Even in Skardu some 1000 m higher, the heat in the middle of the day is near to unbearable. Skardu is at the center of a large Shia population and we arrived to find the streets blocked with processions, battalions of bare chested men beating themselves in remembrance of the assassination of Hussein by the Suni. It was August, in the heat and the dust the songs of remorse and self-flagellation reflected a sense of mass piety not seen in Europe since medieval times. Everywhere were posters exhorting the people to live like Ali and die like Hussein. There was not a woman in sight.

In my opinion it continued to be unbearably hot all the way to Askole (scary eight hour jeep ride) and on through the three days trekking past the Biafo and Panmah valleys with their enticing arrays of distant unclimbed peaklets. Past Payu, across the snout of the Baltoro Glacier, up the Trango Glacier. All too hot by far. But the base camp at Trango is one of the finest, no question at all, so in the end I guess it was worth it.

Trango Base Camp shelters in an ablation valley bordering a lake, its sandy shores giving way to an immense smooth orange slab arched over with granite overlaps. The first 24 hours were spent relaxing, acclimatizing and enjoying the atmosphere. Before us the rose Uli Biaho’s’s magnificent north east face, with the Roskelly route, all 64 pitches of it, soaring into the clouds. Right a bit and the Hainabrak towers on side and pinnacled shoulder of Trango Ri on the other framed the Trango Glacier disappearing towards the Sarpo Lago pass and the Chinese Karakoram. It was easy to be impressed.

Our route lay up a broad scree couloir leading to the base of the Nameless Tower. Eight hundred metres of rubble and boulder scree, just halted at the last angle of repose. Camp One was in the lee of a small cliff in the middle of this couloir, the cliff giving protection from the stonefall. From both sides and, sometimes from above too, there were sporadic and frightening showers of boulders. They left yard wide craters all round the camp. The cliffs around us were so steep that some of the rucksack size rocks had fallen two thousand feet without touching before exploding with the force of artillery shells in our couloir.

The route to our Camp Two continued up the deadly couloir to the base of the Nameless tower and then struck off up a broad ramp of unstable rocks on sloping ledges, before reaching over a small col, more steeply piled boulder scree and finally a quite beautiful Camp site at 5500m. Camp Two on Great Trango is certainly the finest high camp I have ever occupied, bar none. It nestles safely in a fork of granite outcrops and has a perfectly flat sandy base big enough for three tents and running melt water. The views of Masherbrum, Uli Biaho and Payu on southern horizon are balanced by the upper Baltoro giants and Chinese Karakoram to the North.

On 7 August Matt, Duncan, Asfar-Jan and I stocked Camp Two, and in worsening weather hurried down to base. It rained all the next day. We had been at base since 3 August and it had rained at least a little bit every single day we were at base camp. A pair of American climbers, Micah and Eric, said we had just missed 16 days of perfect weather. Somehow, this seems to have been a constant refrain in my life “Oh, you should have been here last week…”

The Pakistan weather forecast now predicted 4 days of good weather, so up death alley we went again in the afternoon of 9 August. The following day we made it to Camp Two in four hours and after setting up the tents and making a brew left at 11am to look at the upper part of the route. It was all crampons and ice axes now. A short 50 degree pitch led to a rather trying traverse on front points. We were now on the edge of a steep glacier and a couple more steep pitches led to a day of zigzagging between the rows of blunt seracs. “How do you say that in French?” ask Duncan. “You won’t believe the answer” I replied “Zigzaguer is the verb… the subjunctive would be something like il faut que nous zizagions…. I think.” We plodded on.

At 2 pm we still had a long way to go, but the main difficulties were behind us. We had intended to do no more than this, but the weather was looking reasonable for once, and we had taken the precaution of carrying spare head-torch batteries. Duncan clinched the discussion by saying he did not want to repeat the horrible traverse with the aching calves again tomorrow. So we went on, and on, and on. A final steep pitch led to a small summit platform at 6:00pm. Now the weather was deteriorating again.

Fortunately we had prepared for the descent by pre-placing a large number of Abalakovs on the way up. It began to snow gently. Night fell, the head torches went on. We made our way down in individual pools of light, the connecting rope disappearing into the darkness. Three rappels and a lot of down climbing later we reached Camp Two. It was still 10 August, but only just.

At Base Camp the next day, the radio brought intermittent news of a bomb plot and the subsequent arrest of British Pakistanis. We left our lakeside base on 12 August after just nine days there. The four days of good weather never did arrive. We had snatched the summit in the only half decent spell while we were there.

With some kind of holistic symmetry Israel withdrew its troops from Lebanon as we left Pakistan, 34 days after entering. Before the final withdrawal, in what appears to have been an act of supreme spite, they bombed the villages they could not otherwise destroy. We read the accounts from both sides. What emerged was the story of the inexcusable piled on the unacceptable. Kidnapping on one side leading to cluster bombing of villages by the other. The unexploded bomblets are even now killing and maiming civilians, old and young. Shamefully it is our British and American companies who have made, supplied and profited from the cluster bombs. We can only watch as the politics of vendetta and adolescent revenge fail to establish stability or peace. Both sides are adopting policies that could never further their stated aims; they should have read Machiavelli. I listened as one Israeli settler compared his country’s future to a modern version of the medieval 100 years war. Not so modern I thought while wondering if Israel could survive that long.

Most of the news in Karachi airport was about the cricket; the local media was outraged at umpire Hair’s decision to accuse the Pakistani team of ball tampering, and worse, to disqualify the team for leaving the pitch. I was watching the TV screens avidly for cricket is, after all, the finest of all team sports, when I heard a voice call my name. It was Mingma, the gathering had begun.
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PEAK FACTS
Name: Great Trango 6286m
Location: Baltoro Glacier, Pakistan Karakoram
Route: West Couloir then North face, FA 1984, Andy Selters and Scott Woolums.
Technical difficulty: AD