Mick Conefrey - The Last Great Mountain: The First Ascent of Kangchenjunga

At around two in the afternoon on Wednesday May 25 th 1955, a pair of young British climbers, George Band and Joe Brown, found themselves sitting on an icy ledge at the top of a steep slope. Back home, George was a geology student who had recently graduated from Cambridge; Joe a general builder who had left school at fourteen. If it hadnt been for climbing, they might never have met but right now, they were partners, the spearhead of the British Kangchenjunga Reconnaissance Expedition.

While they gobbled down toffees and swigged back lemon squash, the wind blew flurries of snow over their heads as it broke on the ridge behind them. At around 27,800 ft they were undoubtedly the highest men in the world who werent encased within a jet-plane but they were still some 350 vertical feet short of their goal. And that was a big problem because they were way beyond their turnaround time.

If everything had gone according to plan, they would have been on their way down. Time was running out and so was their oxygen. They had just two hours left, enough to reach the summit, if that were possible, but not enough to descend safely. If they went on, there was no guarantee of success and they risked being benighted, of having to sleep out in the open with nothing but the clothes they were wearing to protect them from the freezing cold.

So what should they do stick or twist? Carry on up or retreat and hand on the baton to their teammates in the second summit party? Over the last five decades there had been four previous expeditions to Kangchenjunga. Nine men had died, trying to achieve what Everest leader Sir John Hunt called the greatest feat in world mountaineering. Were they willing to risk everything for fame and glory or was it finally time to turn back?

What happened next is both an extraordinary story in its own right and the final chapter of a much longer saga which goes back to the end of the nineteenth century. It is a tale whose cast includes some of the most talented, most driven and occasionally most eccentric characters in the history of mountaineering: men like Aleister Crowley, the occultist nicknamed the Great Beast 666, Paul Bauer, the fanatical German climber and Nazi official, and Gnter Oscar Dyhrenfurth, the mountaineer known to his friends as GOD.

Today Kangchenjunga has been all but eclipsed by Everest, but in the early nineteen thirties, it was briefly the most famous mountain in the world. Even in the nineteen fifties Kangchenjunga was well known enough to generate hundreds of column inches in the worlds press. After the British expedition of 1955 there was a flurry of books. Since then very little has been written but many documents, diaries and letters have emerged which make it possible to give a richer and more complete account of that expedition and the attempts that preceded it. This book is based on those documents as well as interviews with surviving members of the 1955 team.

It is easy to see why so many climbers became so obsessed with Kangchenjunga. It lies on the border of Sikkim in Northern India and Nepal but unlike most of the high mountains of the Himalayas and Karakoram, Kangchenjunga is relatively accessible and is visible from the hill towns of Northern India. It is a huge landmass, technically a massif, with five summits and numerous satellite peaks.

Long before anyone attempted to reach its summit, it was an object of awe and veneration for the indigenous population of Sikkim. They revered it as their holiest mountain, whose summit was home to one of their most important deities. The name Kangchenjunga means the five treasuries of the snow, a reference to the huge glaciers that emanate from its main faces.

It wasnt until the nineteenth century when Britain colonised India and eventually invaded Sikkim, that Kangchenjungas fame spread further. This was an era when in Europe the cultural meaning of mountains was undergoing a dramatic transformation. What previously had been seen as ugly and terrifying topographical features were hailed as the great cathedrals of the earththe beginning and end of all natural scenery in the words of John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic. The Himalayas epitomised mountain landscape at its grandest and most sublime and with no images of Everest or K2 available, the most well-known Himalayan peak was Kangchenjunga. The Victorian artist, Edward Lear, painted it several times and photographs of the mountain were widely reproduced.

Initially Kangchenjunga was assumed to be the highest mountain in the world and even when it was discovered that Everest was about nine hundred feet higher and K2 about eighty feet its superior, Kangchenjunga was still regarded as a great, if not the greatest, challenge in Himalayan mountaineering. Its combination of extreme altitude, treacherous terrain and appalling weather made its ascent a virtually impossible task.

Unlike Everest and K2 which lie farther to the north, in the heart of the Himalayas and the Karakoram, Kangchenjunga sits just a few hundred miles above the Bay of Bengal, the watery cauldron which every year spews forth the monsoon. With no significant mountain ranges in between, Kangchenjunga bears the brunt of the bad weather, with hundreds of tonnes of snow falling on it every summer. Higher up, its ridges are pulverised by hurricane force winds, powerful enough to rip a tent to shreds. Lower down, its slopes are raked by huge avalanches. For any climber, Kangchenjunga is immensely daunting.

The first European forays into the Himalayas were made by soldiers and explorers on intelligence gathering missions but by the late nineteenth century, bona fide mountaineers were arriving, aiming to test their skills against the worlds biggest mountains. Would-be challengers to Kangchenjunga were able to train their telescopes and binoculars on its South West Face from Tiger Hill in Darjeeling, the famous hill resort of British India. Few saw any chinks in its armour. It remained to be seen whether it might be easier to climb from one of its other sides.

The first European to try to get an all-round view was not a climber, but one of Victorian Britains most well-known naturalists, Joseph Hooker, a future director of Kew Gardens. In 1848 Hooker made two extended treks through the region. He was amazed by the Himalayas, describing them as being so sublimely beautiful that it was impossible to convey their impact in words. The first time around, he stuck to the western side of Kangchenjunga, travelling through Nepal to Tibet. On his second expedition he attempted to explore the eastern side but his journey was dramatically cut short when he was arrested by Sikkimese border guards.

After a tense diplomatic stand-off, Hooker eventually returned to Britain and wrote a classic account of his travels, Himalayan Journals , one of the earliest books to capture the scale and uniqueness of the region. A few years later, a trio of German scientist explorers, the Schlagintweit brothers, made further incursions into the Kangchenjunga region and in 1883, a young British traveller, William Woodman Graham enjoyed what some consider to be the first purely mountaineering expedition to the Himalayas, climbing for sport and adventure, rather than any serious scientific purpose. He made a disputed ascent of Kabru, one of Kangchenjungas neighbouring peaks, and contemplated doing a circuit of the whole massif but couldnt complete his mission.