Trango 1988 (part 1a sidebar)
Trango 1988 (part 1a sidebar)
Trango History Series
Sidebar—Meeting Erhard Loretan
I only met Erhard Loretan once, during a Sunday brunch in Rawalpindi, Pakistan in June 1992. He was returning to Switzerland, after his second attempt at a new route on K2. Our team was heading into the mountains, and while delayed by paperwork in the dusty city, Xaver Bongard and I had snuck into the Hotel Intercontinental, dressed in our best, and somehow had talked our way to a table at the lavish Intercontinental Sunday brunch, famous among starving mountaineers. Our digs were a dive across town where we subsisted on local food—mostly chapatis and dal—so the hotel’s expansive western-style buffet was a treat. (footnote)
Footnote: For our permitted 6000m peak, our budget was about $2000 per person, a lot of money in those days to spend on a climbing trip, but climbers going for the highest peaks were generally part of large international teams with large expense budgets (the permit alone exceeded our whole trip cost), so booking the best hotels in Rawlpindi and Skardu with capacity for a large team was the norm.
Erhard Loretan was of course an international legend in the 1980s—not only was he ticking off audacious new alpine routes on the highest peaks in the most minimalist style, such as the north wall of Everest in a single 43-hour alpine push with Jean Troillet in 1986, but he was also one of the best rock climbers too. And unlike many of the top expedition climbers, who were either state-funded, or fully salaried professional climbers (‘sponsored’, though still rare in those days), Erhard was a top-level guide and financed by friends and fans (he later wrote, “For me it is freedom. That’s why I don’t look for sponsors, I like to wear the underwear of my choice!”). The international rivalries and the race to climb first ascents or first winter ascents of all the 8000m peaks was in high gear (at the time, only Reinhold Messner and Jerzy Kukuczka had climbed all 14 8000m peaks—Loretan would become the third in 1995). Loretan’s lightweight expeditions were both time and cost efficient, and not a season went by when some new eye-opening realm of what was possible in the mountains was exposed by Erhard and his partners.
Erhard and Xaver were friends from the same town of Fribourg in Switzerland, so Erhard came over to our table while he was waiting for his ride to the airport. He had just returned from a lightweight alpine attempt on the fearsome west wall of K2 with Voytek Kurtyka (footnote). I was stunned at his matter-of-fact humility in how he described climbing to 6400m, and even with their fast alpine climbing style, decided that the avalanche danger and windslab conditions were too marginal to continue even in the coldest hours of night, so called for a retreat (he once said, “We are always looking for things to do—even if we estimate the chance of success at 10%, its enough to make it worth a try.”). I realised that his persistent and performance based approach was the key to his prolific record, and made a note to myself not to take my own failures so seriously.
Footnote: (this face of K2 was not climbed until 2007 in a “prolonged siege of two and a half months”—see Russians successfully siege K2’s hardest line, by Lindsay Griffin).
It was in this awe that I chatted with Erhard, though most of the conversation was with Xaver as they caught up speaking French—there was a lot of expedition gossip that year (I gathered the main ideas, but Xaver caught me up with the details later). And of course I was ultra-curious to hear Erhard’s thoughts of his 1988 Trango ascent, as we were heading there and seeking any tips to help make our efforts more streamlined. He recommended the Dunge basecamp and gave us some tips on the approach gulleys from that side. When asked specifically about his new route on the east wall of Trango with Voytek Kurtyka, he replied simply “Très bien” with a wry smile, void of any irony, pretty much in the same vein as Yosemite’s “not too bad” might describe a big wall specialist’s week of epic toil and terror on a hard El Cap nailing route. It amazed me how Erhard and Voytek’s teamwork and alpine approach to the mountains had crossed over so efficiently in the specialised realm of bigwall climbing. Despite the recognition of Xaver and my extensive experience on big walls, there was also the clear hint that the Karakoram was never to be underestimated. Kind of a “if you know, you know” answer to a “if you have to ask…” question.
I knew….kind of.
(end of sidebar)
Postscript—Vacation in Slippers
In Night Naked, a posthumous biography of Erhard Loretan published in 2013 by Jean Ammann from interviews, journals, and writings, Erhard’s story “My Vacation in Slippers on Trango Tower” appears. It is a poetic tale of meeting with Voytek in Kathmandu, hearing of his 1986 attempt on the “granite curtains” of Trango Tower, and becoming “seduced by the beauty of his project.” Erhard notes that “climbing as a pair would make our style of ascent more efficient” (no one had yet attempted a wall of this stature with only a team of two), and relates the strategy and isolation of their two weeks climbing the route above their initial fixed ropes, averaging two pitches a day: “We had decided to alternate days on lead. That allowed the second to dress warmly and to be bundled up in a down jacket as he kept track of the leader’s progress. The rope that moves through the belayer’s hand reveals everything about the leader’s climbing. Sometimes sudden slack in the line tells the belayer that the leader has just taken flight and that in a few split seconds, catching the fall will truly be in his hands. That day it was Voytek’s turn to be ‘on the pointy end’. He took a thrity-five-foot fall in the morning and another fall at the end of the day. His two attempts to escape gravity left him with a bashed elbow and thumb. that pair of incidents would affect him for the rest of the ascen. They reminded us of the need to climb as safely as possible. The massif was so remote and the face so committing that the smallest incident would take on catastrophic proportions. We weren’t on the Eiger or the Matterhorn; we weren’t messing around on hotel balconies.“
He concludes his story of climbing “a superb line on a superb mountain” with a comparison: “I loved this first ascent of the east face of Trango Tower because it didn’t have the stressful aspect of an 8000er. Of course, the technical difficulty was far greater than on my Himalayan summits, but this time the altitude was hospitable and merciful. It was nothing like the death zone, which cannot be ventured into with impunity. This was a relaxed, chilled-out expedition—a vacation that I could have spent almost without taking off my climbing slippers.”
By the way…
Kurtyka Loretan Route, 1988
(to be continued —next: Trango 1988 part b)