Nanda Devi: The Tragic Expedition

John Roskelley

Seattle: The Mountaineers Books, 2000 [1987]. ISBN: 0-89886-739-8. Pp. 237

As a young man, Willi Unsoeld spied the beautiful 25,645-foot peak of Nanda Devi in the remote part of the Indian Himalayas. Enchanted, and with a strong streak of mysticism, he later named his daughter after it. With a legendary father and an exuberant personality, it was only a matter of time that Devi would attempt to climb the eponymous mountain. And so, in 1976, her father, together with H. Adams 'Ad' Carter (member of the team that made the first summit of the peak in 1936), organized an Indo-American expedition to climb a virgin route on the exceptionally steep and dangerous Northwest Face, and then proceed up the technically challenging almost vertical Buttress that guards the North Ridge approach to the summit. For such a daunting task, the expedition needed some very experienced and strong climbers, so they asked John (the author), Jim States, and Lou Reichardt to join. The group also invited another woman, Marty Hoey and her former partner Peter Lev, along with the much less experienced Andy Harvard and Elliot Fisher (John Evans to come much later). On the Indian side, Captain Kiran Kumar, Sergeant Nirmal Singh, and two trainees rounded up the climbing part of the team.

The expedition nearly unraveled from the get-go over conflicts about the style of ascent and the route. Purists wanted to attempt an Alpine-style while more realistic climbers preferred a variant of the traditional for the Himalayas siege-method with many intermediate camps. Climbers must have very strong and determined personalities otherwise they would never reach a single technical peak. This alters the proportion of personality clashes until they reach strains that would have a "normal" human being scratch his head in bewilderment. It is not, however, a simple matter of egos over cooperation. One can easily see that experienced climbers have learnt to trust their judgment (in that, climbers are like pilots: when Fay from the sitcom Wings told Joe that he was a very good pilot when she had just met him, he asked how she knew that; "Well, you're still alive, aren't you?" was her reply). So when this judgment is challenged, the reaction is likely to be overwhelmingly negative. This problem would crop up time and again during the trek to the Sanctuary and the climb itself. Another reason for the seriousness of these clashes appears to have to do with trust, or rather, the lack of it. A climber must be able to trust his partners with his life for very often it will literally depend on them. If there is strong disagreement about appropriate routes and behavior on the mountain, this trust is implicitly undermined, and this probably makes everybody even more jittery. Add to this the philosophical conflict between purity of style and achieving the peak, and you have a titanic clash.

Mr Roskelley does not shy away from narrating things as he saw them. He reports his misgivings about the wisdom of many initial decisions (such as taking former lovers and another woman), and pulls no punches in his assessment of fellow expedition members. His style may be honest but it is obviously very abrasive, and one can see why the others named a latrine at one of the camps Le John because, they said, it had a cold and heartless personality. On my reading, it was not what Mr Roskelley said as much as how he said it that was the real problem for the others. However, that does not explain infantile behavior (like Devi jumping him or sticking her hand in a jar of peanut butter), and neither does it condone reckless disregard for others (like Peter's obstinate insistence on establishing a "safe" escape route in a place where there was nearly unanimous consent was inappropriate). However much can one wish for some team members to have been more tactful, it is well-nigh impossible to excuse the ones who found themselves on the receiving end of brutal honesty.

Not surprisingly, the expedition ran into serious trouble long before it got to the mountain. This was before instant communications and commercial organization made the Himalayas accessible to any determined and solvent enthusiast, so the trek to Nanda Devi itself was an adventure that nearly cost Marty's life. She had to be evacuated in a helicopter before the group reached the Sanctuary, and only after the strenuous insistence of the expedition medic (Jim) and over the objections of other members. (Marty would later perish on Everest.) Nearly half of the book is consumed by the trek to Base Camp in the Sanctuary, and it is actually a fascinating read. Mr Roskelley has few kind words to say about the mired in poverty country through which they had to travel. He also alternates between grudging satisfaction and overt displeasure when it comes to the performance of the scores of porters hired to move all the gear to Base. Having seen some less than stellar behavior of porters myself, I would have to say the picture is probably correct. None of that starry-eyed 'romantic' attitude toward exotic people in this book.

The narrative then follows the month-and-a-half siege of Nanda Devi. Although punctured by the occasional close call in a huge avalanche, and enlivened by the personality conflicts that flared up on almost every occasion, Mr Roskelley's account is a bit dull in places. After all, most of the expedition's time was consumed in shuttling back and forth between camps, ferrying loads, and digging platforms to put their tents on. For a non-climber like me, the story really bogs down when Mr Roskelley describes in excruciatingly minute detail particular climbs (e.g., his lead on the Buttress). In some ways, I can see why he wanted to put that in, he must be justifiably proud of the accomplishment and he also must convey some of the sense of drama that he surely must have felt (I would be especially nervous if I were hanging on a fraying rope too). But for some reason all the technical jargon just gets in the way and the account does not convey successfully the feeling of being there (unlike, for example, Mr Krakauer's). This is probably due in no small degree to the generally stilted writing style. Very often, the narrative degenerates into "he said, she said, then he said" which Mr Roskelley amateurishly tries to make more dynamic by replacing "said" with some near-synonym. The result is actually worse: "he said, she yelled, he cried."

So what happened, then, on Nanda Devi in 1976? Mr Roskelley, Jim, and Lou made a successful ascent on September 1 and Devi suddenly died in Camp IV a week later of health problems complicated by the altitude. Her father, Peter, and Andy (who was going to marry her) consigned her body to the mountain in an astonishingly cold display of pragmatism. Willi Unsoeld may have been a great mountaineer (he would die two years later in an avalanche on Mount Rainier) but his behavior on this expedition remains puzzling. He abdicated the leadership role that he was supposed to play too often (even though the other leader, Ad, left much to be desired as well: after forcing the expedition to attempt an ascent during an inappropriate season just because it coincided with his time off work, he left before the team made an attempt at the summit). Willi never seems to have challenged some of the more questionable choices his daughter was making, never seems to have taken into account her near-total inexperienced, and never seems to have considered seriously his trust in her judgment: Devi does not strike me as one who would willingly tell others she was in pain. Ultimately, of course, it is Devi's responsibility to take care of her own life although I can't help but wonder what would have happened to Marty had they left her to decide what she wanted to do.

A worthwhile read, Mr Roskelley's take on this expedition should be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, his version of events, a fact he never tries to conceal. In the afterword to the 2000 edition, he shows that there are still mutual ill feelings between some former expedition members, and, somewhat surprisingly, he is refused permission to talk about some of them. The book is an interesting story of how not to manage an expedition but as analysis of the human problems, it falls way short of the mark. I cannot help but feel as if the book has all the ingredients of a great story, it's just that it is not this one.

September 29, 2005