I don`t pretend to be a climbing hotshot, whether on steep rock next to the road or new-routing on a Himalayan giant.
As an objective, Pik Lenin seemed to satisfy my desire nonetheless to climb very high, something I had wanted to do on the much more difficult Fluted Peak in Nepal, but which was not to be. Lenin is technically one of the easier 7000ers, being little more than a very long walk in the sky.
But easier mountains attract more people, presumably those thinking along the same lines as I. More people means more casualties when something nasty happens. And thus it is not surprising that in 1990, Camp Two on the standard route of Pik Lenin saw the worst accident in mountaineering history, at least if one goes by the number of fatalities, forty two to be exact. The seracs above the camp had not shed more than normal amounts of ice for as long as anyone could remember. And the occupants of Camp Two felt entitled to feel safe. But on the fateful night an earthquake caused a huge avalanche from these seracs to come bearing down on this camp, which was swept with contemptuous power into the crevasses of the icefall beneath.
The swashbuckling Mark Miller was at an unplanned intermediary camp when this happened (the slowness of one of his clients thus saving his life). Running to the scene in the moonless night, he then helped where he could, but it must have been a grizzly task, wandering amongst the crevasses, listening out for any signs of life in the dark tombs below.
Mark was our leader on Pik Lenin a year later. Commercial guiding was in its early days and he was determined to get the first British fee-paying client to the top of a 7000er. This he managed by doing herculean load-carries between Camps One and Two.
So it mattered less that two of us were hit by stomach bugs at Base Camp and thus unable to contribute for several days at an important stage in the proceedings.
Camp Two was newly positioned out of the way of said seracs but it didn`t prevent a sizeable stone landing on the pillow where my head had been a few minutes previously. In this photo Mark is holding the offending rock, hoping that it would be sufficient proof for the insurance claim he intended to make in respect of the damaged tent.
Tragically Mark never made that insurance claim. He instead perished in a PIA plane that came down in the hills around Kathmandu in 1992, shortly after I had been with him on Mount McKinley in Alaska. They say only the good die young, but it shouldn`t have happened that way.