An Ascent of Sunanda Devi (Nanda Devi East)
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| Climbing past the gendarmes between Camp 1 on Longstaff Col and Camp 2. I am climbing in the middle distance |
ANZAC Day always bring back all kinds of memories, some good and some less so. Just recently I had some old slides scanned which arrived just before ANZAC day. It was ANZAC day 22 years ago today that I received a call to get on an immediate flight to India to join a Defence cooperation exercise in India which was to involve an ascent of Nanda Devi. The mountain stands at 7816 metres is it protected by a ring of peaks of which 12 are over 6,400 metres. The first ascent was by Bill Tillman and Noel Odell who were able to enter the Nanda Devi Sanctuary via Rishi Gangi Gorge.
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| The ridge between Nanda Devi and Sunanda Devi |
The peak has a colorful history which includes the attempted installation of a nuclear powered monitoring device for Chinese nuclear tests. Turned back by bad weather, the device was lost somewhere on Sunanda Devi and was never found. Later Willi Unsoeld, famous for the first traverse and ascent of the west ridge of Everest, tragically lost his daughter, Nanda Devi Onsoeld on an attempted ascent of the peak.
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| Fractured rock and old rope along the ridge. You needed to careful what you clipped into or pulled on! |
The Nanda Devi and the Rishi Ganga gorge is now an UNESCO bio-sphere. As a result, the plan for the expedition was to approach from the north east and to traverse the 3km ridge between Sunanda Devi and Nanda Devi and return back via the ridge. A one way traverse had been completed once before by a Japanese expedition.
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| Descending down the ridge in bad weather |
The expedition was aimed at developing military ties and involved experienced 8000 metre summiteers from the Nepalese Mountain Warfare School, American mountain warfare experts from the 1st Special Forces group and paratroopers from the UK's Third Airborne Brigade.
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| Entering the first rock band between Camp 2 and Camp 3 |
The expedition, led by the Indian Army, was a massive siege based affair, firmly rooted in the style of large national expeditions from the 1950-70's. A long and hard winter meant a low snow line and avalanche run-out across the trail on the approach meaning that we couldn't use horses to transport gear to base camp as was planned. This meant load carrying from the road for the climbers. This was further complicated by the deaths of the expedition logistics leader and his 2IC whose jeep rolled off a cliff.
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| Pasang and I waiting at Camp 3 for the first summit team. Despite his portly physique, he was a machine at altitude |
We arrived in base camp two weeks later, already exhausted from carrying loads and started the hard work of carrying more loads and establishing the route to the traverse ridge. However the death of the two Indian members had cast a pall over the expedition. The inevitable delays meant that we were closing in the the start of monsoon and time. This combined with the death of a Czech climber, whose body I recovered, on the same route, some bad weather and the first up-close views of the fearsome ridge saw our objective change to the lesser peak of Sunanda Devi.
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| The view 14,000 feet down into Rishi Gangi Gorge from below the summit. This is near the area from where Jake fell. |
After establishing ABC and three camps on the mountain, we had a break from load carrying to allow the weather to clear before moving up the mountain in our summit teams. Among the foreigners, I was working with the Nepalis on the third summit team led by Pasang Norbu Sherpa and ahead of me were the Americans Jake and Randy with Jim Truscott on the second team.
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| Jim Truscott and I on the summit of Sunanda Devi with Nanda Devi in the background |
The sad irony was that while most of us were keen recreational climber's and, in many cases, we had lobbied to get a seat on the expedition, Jake was on Nanda Devi because he was told to be there. It seemed he would have preferred to be home with his family. It is on ANZAC Day that I consider my many military colleagues who have lost their lives in peace and war and the price of their commitment, and I often think of Jake.
By means of a postscript, twenty years later I was in an internet cafe in Keylong on my way to a mountain in northern Himachal Pradesh when I saw a Devi summit photo from the same expedition and I recognized one of the Indian Army climbers. As I enthusiastically inquired about the photo it dawned on me that it was a shrine. The owner of the cafe was his brother and he had died on a peak a couple of years after Nanda Devi. We sat and had a cup of chai and talked of climbing.
