The 13th International Festival of Mountaineering Literature
Above: K2 veterans reunited from left to right, Tony Streather, Charlie Houston and Bob Bates.
The audience rose in a spontaneous standing ovation a Charlie Houston finished speaking.After all we'd been listening to real live history. Charlie, now 86, first climbed with Bob Bates (88) in Alaska in 1933. Now, informing and entertaining on the subject of K2, they held 300 people rapt. Jim Curran, only half tongue in cheek, had introduced them as: "The Shipton and Tilman of America." Neither spoke from their notes;their memories were pin-sharp. As Bob recalled the 1938 K2 reconnaissance expedition, we watched astonishing black and white footage projected behind him. It was awesome to be hearing and seeing this.
The war intervened, and after Charlie Houston reminded us that the Americans had won it, he told us about the 1953 K2 trip. I nearly said "tragic" or "ill-fated" there but Charlie would have none of that. Despite the death of Art Gilkey;despite the fact that they did not summit, Charlie saw the expedition as a success.
They were there for fun, to share an adventure. "Rope bridges make Christians out of mountaineers," said Charlie. They had their excitement and they were, and remained, an astonishingly close team. Evidence of that was the presence at the festival of Tony Streather, the only Briton on the trip.As these three grand old men of the mountains stood together, it wasn't only Festival Director Terry Gifford who struggled to maintain a dry eye.
That said, Charlie Houston stopped climbing after 1953, assessing that if he went back to K2 the risk would be too great for a man with a wife and three kids. He spoke a little about how, instead, he immersed himself in medical work, then told us about endorphins and the evidence for superhuman feats made possible by an adrenaline rush.
But to begin almost at the beginning. Tom Price was one of the finds of the festival. He gave us a slant on Jeff Connor's biography Creagh Dhu Climber: The Life and Times of John Cunningham, as Connor himself, a sports editor on a Scottish newspaper, was tied to his desk on a Saturday.
Tom Price was two for the price (no pun intended) of one. He came to know John Cunningham well during nine months spent together in South Georgia. Cunningham, as well as being a fine climber, was a shipwright, a wrestler and a raconteur. The book though, is as much about the Creagh Dhu, a secretive "mountaineering gang" with great esprit de corps, said Tom, as it is about John Cunningham. Tom was full of dry, pithy anecdotes about both. When the Creagh Dhu visited the Lakes, apparently they climbed on Beinn Sca and camped by LochWas. Tom likened the Creagh Dhu to Hall's Angels: if you met them individually they were all right.
As we applauded the old American masters at the festival's climax it seemed an age since the proceedings had begun with David Rose and Ed Douglas each reading an extract from their biography of Alison Hargreaves. They came across as sound journalists writing for the general public rather than a mountaineering readership. David Rose diplomatically dealt with questions about the sensitive issue of domestic relationships which have given the book some notoriety.
Terry Gifford probed Jim Curran about the writing of High Achiever:The Life and Times of Chris Bonington. Chris, we learnt, was neither 'one of the lads' nor 'one of the chaps'; he's not at ease in social situations, he's quite uncon- ventional and anti-establishment and, most significantly, he's an excellent climber with a staggering track record. Ken Wilson, from the floor, pointed out that he, like Bonington, had just missed national service. Curran, rapier-like: "It would have done you good." Applause and laughter.
Paul Pritchard, as you will al ready know, won the 1999 Boardman Tasker Award for his remarkable Totem Pole.'A Whole New Adventure. He read a 'super-con- densed' version of the book. His narrative was the more powerful for its simplicity;humour and hon- esty shone through.To hear Paul's response to what life has dealt him was a humbling experience. Emile Zopfi had come from Switzerland to mark the appearance of his new book The Colour of the Black Mountains. As he read one of his short stories, dry humour and striking language came through his occasionally difficult accent.
Anne Sauvy also talked with some success in English about her recent fiction, Darkness and the Azure. Extracts from her most recent writ- ing,'about the work of the PGHM, the rescue service in Chamonix, were read by Sue Harper and Ken Wilson.Anne's prose was icily powerful in describing the dance of a female body choreagraphed by wind and death as it was winchad off. a rock face by a helicopter. Stuart B. Campbell read a selection from the recent, excellent Scottish poetry anthology, Things Not Seen, skilfully illustrating the festival's theme of risk with his choice of poems. Juggling two hats but wearing none, this reporter was also on the festival's bill, read- ing from his new poetry collection Inside The New Map. Nodesty precludes a positive review of this item, but a good number of copies were snapped up as part of the roaring trade which characterized Grant and Val Jarvis's travelling bookstore.
Dave Gregory, chair of the Boardman Tasker judges and not a man to sit on the fence, gave a typically abrasive rundown on their deliberations, which you will have seen reported last month in these pages.
A Climber's Eye, a retrospective exhibition of the line/washes and drawings of the late artist BillWynn ( 1929-1998), was given intriguing insight by Harold Drasdo's quirky and illuminating essay in the show's catalogue. It also gave the opportunity for Gill Round to present the artist's widow, NarjorieWynn, with a surprise cake as Tenor Gifford led the birthday chorus. Such touches are part of what the festival is about; a big occasion which celebrates the uniqueness of the individual.
That same attention to detail showed again with the winning entry in the High/Festival Writing Competition. lan Smith referred to the pleasure of his deliberations with co-judge Brian Blessed, when he would receive an extremely loud and theatrical call about the difficulty of ranking the best en- tries. "1 don't know why he used the phone," mused lan.
A spotlight isolated a tent on the stage. Two figures emerged, were accosted by an English-speaking yeti and in five minutes the scenario reached an unpredictable climax. With minimal chance for rehearsal, lan Smith had directed three students from Bretton Hall in a neat cameo. It was that attention to detail again.
The festival attracted its first fringe event this year. The ever innovative Ken Wilson, or Boton Wicks as he is known to AIpinists, had combined two classics, Eric Shipton's Nanda Devi and H W Tilman's The Ascent of Nanda Devi, in a new volume, Nanda Devi, Ex- ploration and Ascent, especially for this year's event. Charlie Houston has contributed a meaty introduction and there's also a rundown on the CIA shenanigans on Nanda Devi in the 1960s. Eric's son,John Shipton, and Charlie himself, whose scurrilous references to Wilson went down particularly well, both entertained a large crowd at the launch. The book, still wet with printer's ink, sold briskly.
I say something similar each time I report on the festival but," despite the supportive sponsorship by High, The Ernest Press, Baton Wicks, Constable and Michael Joseph, Gifford again did a phenomenal job of putting together a fascinating day on the proverbial shoe-string. Pete Sinclair knows how good it is; he flew from Seattle just to be in the audience.
If you have the slightest interest in mountain literature, you should be at this event. It attracts many fine mountain writers from Britain and beyond and should attract them all with historical alliances and imagined tribalism forgotten. But be warned, next year, due to increasing numbers and the difficulty of planning for crowds on the door, it will be a matter of all tickets in advance.
The above article was extracted from High Society/ High Magazine written by Kevin Borman