In 1982, following the relaxation of access restrictions to Tibet, six climbers set off for the Himalaya to explore the little-known Shishapangma massif in Tibet. Dealing with a chaotic build-up and bureaucratic obstacles so huge they verged on comical, the mountaineers gained access to Shishapangma's unclimbed South-West Face where Doug Scott, Alex Mac Intyre and Roger Baxter-Jones made one of the most audacious and stylish Himalayan climbs ever.
First published in 1984 as The Shishapangma Expedition, Shishapangma won the first ever Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. Told through a series of diary-style entries from all the climbers involved, Shishapangma reveals the difficult nature of Himalayan decision-making, mountaineering tacti and climbing relationships. Tense and candid, the six writers see every event differently, reacting in different ways and pulling no punches in their opinions of the other mountaineers – quite literally at one point. Nonetheless, the climbers, at the peak of their considerable powers and experience, completed an extremely committing enterprise. The example set by their fine climb survives and several new routes (all done in alpine style) have now been added to this magnificent face.
For well-trained climbers, such ascents are fast and efficient, but the consequences of error, misjudgement or bad luck can be terminal and, sadly, soon afterwards two of the participants were struck down in mountaineering accidents – Mac Intyre hit by stonefall on Annapurna's South Face and Baxter-Jones being caught by an ice avalanche on the Aiguille du Triolet. In addition their support climber, Nick Prescott, died in a Chamonix hospital from an altitude-induced ailment. Shishapangma is a gripping first-hand account of the intense reality of high-altitiude alpinism.
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Alex Mac Intyre was one of the legendary early-1970s Leeds University climbers noted for their big hair, Lycra tights and habit of calling one another ‘youth’. A popular climber, he was a leading figure in alpine climbing’s ‘front-point revolution’ in the 1970s, when a group of British climbers pushed standards dramatically higher, climbing hard and difficult routes in a light and fast alpine style. With a glittering record of firsts in the Alps and Andes, Mac Intyre was a great supporter of alpine-style ethi, pushing the style into the Himalaya, where he made ascents and attempts on major objectives – such as Shishapangma – and hard new routes on giants like Dhaulagiri and Changabang. Mac Intyre died on Annapurna in 1982 aged only twenty-eight years old. He and René Ghilini were retreating from an attempt on the south face when a solitary falling stone struck him square on the head and knocked him down 800 feet. A memorial stone at Annapurna Base Camp reads: ‘Better to live one day as a tiger than to live for a thousand years as a sheep.’ John Porter’s award-winning book One Day as a Tiger (Vertebrate Publishing, 2014) is both a memoir of Alex, and of this golden period of British alpinism.
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