Stephen Venables is one high altitude mountaineer you’ve heard about, since he didn’t die young.
I really enjoyed his 2008 career retrospective – Higher Than the Eagle Soars: A Path to Everest.
It won Best Book — Mountain Literature at the 2007 Banff Mountain Book Festival.
In 1988, Venables became the first Briton to ascend the summit of Mount Everest without bottled oxygen. His ascent, as far as the South Col, was by a new route up the Kangshung Face from Tibet, with just three other climbers, Americans Robert Anderson and Ed Webster, and Canadian Paul Teare.
All four reached the South Col but Teare decided to descend from here, concerned about incipient altitude sickness. The other three continued up the final section of the normal 1953 route, but Anderson and Webster were forced to turn back at the South Summit.
Meanwhile Venables reached the summit alone, at 3.40 pm.[1] Descending late in the day, he decided to bivouac in the open at about 8,600 metres, rather than risk a fall by continuing in the dark. Anderson and Webster spent the night slightly lower in an abandoned Japanese tent. In the morning all three were reunited and continued down to their own tents on the South Col. It took them a further three days to complete an epic retreat down the Kangshung Face. All three climbers suffered some frostbite, with Webster affected worst. …
Venables is a fine writer. A better writer than climber if his autobiography is to be believed.
An early letter of recommendation from one Dr. Buxton:
Dear Sirs,
Stephen Venables shows little aptitude for academic work, so he might as well spend the summer climbing.
He recently injured himself falling off a cliff in Bristol, so I should imagine that some alpine training would be a very good idea.
Yours sincerely,
John Buxton
His life story is one of one underfunded, under-planned, over-enthusiastic misadventure after another. I’m very happy to be a hiker, not a climber after reading the life & death tale of Kangshung.
Venables as a young man hung out at Snell’s Field in Chamonix while his American contemporaries were living on a shoestring budget at Camp 4 in Yosemite.
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