By Andy Fanshawe & Stephen Venables
Published by Hodder & Staughton

From the Banff Mountain Book Festival:

The Grand Prize winner at the Banff Mountain Book Festival is an extremely well-researched book which could only be written by those such as the authors: climbers with immense credibility and first-hand experience.

Andy Fanshawe was only involved with this project in its initial stages, and Stephen Venables had to take it over in 1992 after Fanshawe's untimely death at the age of 28 in Scotland. Fanshawe's bold, alpine climbing style is well documented in this sumptuous volume in the first traverse of the twin summits of Chogolisa and the first ascent of Menlungtse West.

Venables exudes that quiet yet hard-core confidence that comes with more than 25 years of climbing around the world, and several acclaimed books under his belt. His book Painted Mountains won the 1986 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature. Many of his Himalayan expeditions have been both bold and exploratory, but probably his most acclaimed was the east face of Everest in 1988 when he was part of a four-man team tackling a major new route on Everest, becoming the first Briton to climb Everest without oxygen.

This book was an Everest of sorts for Venables as he eventually assumed full responsibility for finishing it. He gave a presentation of the book at the Banff Mountain Book Festival in 1995, when he expected to launch the book, rather than accepting the grand prize this year.

The wait was well worth it, and many an evening can be spent sampling from this creme de la creme of alpine routes from Pakistan to Tibet. With superb reproductions, engaging writing, clean maps and drawings, and useful summaries of statistical and logistical information, this volume crosses categories from an inspiring guide book, good literature, a fantastic picture book, to a well-researched historical volume.

(Check out Outside Online's book review.)

Excerpt:

In April 1982, Alex Maclntyre, Roger Baxter-Jones and Doug Scott traveled through Tibet to the foot of the huge unclimbed South-West Face of Shishapangma, 8046 meters, the thirteenth highest peak in the world. On 25 May, without having ever before set foot on the mountain, they started to climb the steep snow and icefields at the bottom of the 2,500-meter-high face. On their backs were heavy rucksacks with food for four days, a sleeping bag each and a stove and tent between them. They also carried ropes and a small rack of essential climbing gear. On the 28th, after three bivouacs on the face, they reached the summit and by the 29th were safety back at base camp.

This, in its purest form, had been an alpine-style ascent. The climbers had treated their Himalayan wall like a traditional climb in the European Alps, leaving base and moving up the mountain continuously, eschewing any further contact with the ground. There was no support from back-up teams, pre-placed camps, fixed ropes, or supplementary oxygen; self-sufficiency was paramount.

Mountaineering historians tend glibly to describe "alpine-style" as a uniquely modern phenomena ousting the "traditional" Himalayan tactics of massive, quasi-military expeditions sieging mountains into submission by sheer force of logistics. This simplistic view ignores two important points. First, those huge "sieges" were the obvious reaction to the sheer colossal scale of the Himalaya and its unique problems of altitude--not to mention isolation--which put the range in a completely different league from the Alps. Just because people operated (and often still do operate) in large, highly organized teams, it does not mean their exploits lacked adventure. Second, the alpine-style approach is not as radical chic as many suppose. It has been with us from the start, ever since Alfred Mummery made his futuristic attempt on the Diamir Face of Nanga Parbat a hundred years ago.

Mummery and Raghobir Thapa reached nearly 7,000 meters on that gigantic ice wall in 1895, before retreating from their brave, naive step into the unknown. A few years later, Dr. Alexander Kellas made several first ascents in Sikkim, including 7065m Pauhunri, in similar lightweight style, with a small band of Sherpa servants. It was he, in preparation for the Everest Reconnaissance of 1921, who insisted that the world's highest mountain could be climbed without supplementary oxygen. On the basis of laboratory calculations he estimated a possible ascent rate above 8,000 meters of about 100 meters per hour, exactly what Peter Habeler and Reinhold Messner were to achieve when they made their historic ascent of Everest without supplementary oxygen in 1978.

The desire to do more with less, to keep things simple, to travel light and fast, to give the mountain a sporting chance, is not new. Colin Kirkus and Charles Warren climbed Bhagirathi III alpine-style in 1933; they just didn't have a label for it. Fine notions of ethical purity came later, in the mid-seventies. The great walls like Nanga Parbat's Rupal Face and Makalu's West Pillar had succumbed to heavyweight campaigns; now people began to think light, even on the much prized eight-thousanders, starting in 1975 with Peter Habeler's and Reinhold Messner's swashbuckling three-day dash up and down the North-West Face of Hidden Peak. Hot on their heels came the charismatic Pole, Wojciech Kurtyka, known to all as 'Voytek', and his various European associates, including the ambitious young Englishman, Alex MacIntyre.