Free The Beckoning Silence by Joe Simpson Page B

Productions, hoped that Chantal and I might be able to climb together on camera at a later date and I looked forward to it.
    We chatted briefly and she mentioned that she had enjoyed reading La Mort suspendue , the French edition of Touching the Void . She was charming and friendly company and we exchanged news of mutual friends in Chamonix as we drank tea and rested at a lodge. She told me of her plan to make an alpine-style ascent of the south face of Annapurna and I was astounded at its boldness. She made a joke about me being accident-prone. We parted company with a cheery wave and I watched as she walked briskly up a forested track. I hoped we might meet again in Kathmandu but it was not to be.
    I never heard how she fared on Annapurna but eighteen months later, in mid-May 1998, I received a phone call from Richard Else telling me that Chantal had died on Dhaulagiri. She and Ang Tsering were found buried in their tent at Camp 2 on the Normal Route. It was never clear whether they had been hit by a small avalanche, or simply buried by fresh snow, which they neglected to clear, and had been asphyxiated as a consequence. However, Chantal was later found to have a broken neck which suggested the crushing impact of an avalanche was the likeliest explanation.
    I had met Anatoli Boukreev briefly at the Banff Film Festival in Canada in November 1997. To my mind Anatoli was one of the world’s greatest climbers. His list of ascents was impressive. He had climbed eleven of the world’s fourteen 8000-metre peaks without oxygen and had summitted Everest three times. Indeed he had summitted solo on many of the world’s highest peaks, in less than a day, in winter and always without oxygen.
    His part in saving three stranded climbers in a storm on Everest in 1996 that was to claim eight lives was one of the most astounding rescues in mountaineering history. Not only did he perform the rescue single-handed in the dark of a storm-swept night on the South Col, but he had only recently climbed Everest without oxygen. Yet of all the guides and clients sheltering in tents on the South Col at the time, he was the only man strong enough, or willing enough, to attempt the rescue.
    Although Jon Krakauer’s exceptional book about the Everest tragedy Into Thin Air referred to Boukreev’s strength and past achievements, he seemed to play down Boukreev’s efforts. Indeed he was roundly critical of some of Boukreev’s actions during that day and the consequent storm-blasted night. Somehow he overlooked his own relative inexperience at high altitude as compared to Boukreev’s phenomenal record of ascents. I never did comprehend how someone, quite understandably exhausted by his own oxygen-assisted ascent of the mountain, could sleep through the events of that night and then later write critically of Boukreev. Boukreev made repeated solo forays into the teeth of a blizzard to rescue three climbers who otherwise would certainly have died in the stormy darkness at 26,000 feet. I admire Jon Krakauer hugely, both as a climber and a highly talented writer, but I felt his treatment of Boukreev did him no credit whatsoever.
    It was a great honour for me when Anatoli signed my copy of The Climb – ‘Joe, enjoy the life and mountains’. He asked about Simon Yates, my climbing partner on Siula Grande in 1985. Simon had worked as a guide with Anatoli and they were firm friends. It seemed a small world. Less than eight weeks later, on Christmas Day, Anatoli died in an avalanche on the south face of Annapurna I.
    Ray Delaney and I were drinking beers in P.K.’s lodge in Namche Bazaar when a familiar-looking American offered some friendly advice about potential areas for exploration. We had chatted briefly and inconsequentially and it was only later as Ray and I had set off down the valley towards Phakding that I realised that we had been speaking to Alex Lowe. Ray wasn’t convinced and we bickered about this as we headed down the switch-backs below