Growing up in a family of mountain enthusiasts, I would often hear my parents and their friends tell stories of climbing adventures in North America and Europe. A highlight of every trip to my mother's home in Austria was a visiting her old climbing parter, Günther, where we would watch slideshows on the living room wall of his latest climbing expeditions around the world. At home, my parents bookshelves overflowed with books on mountain exploits. I reread these often and still ask for climbing books for Christmas each year. Among several epic mountains that have captivated my interest over the years is Annapurna I.*
Annapurna massif: view from Phewa Tal (lake) in Pokhara
The Annapurna massif, the Circuit's namesake, is a group of six major peaks in Central Nepal: Annapurna I - IV, Gangapurna, and Annapurna South. Annapurna I is the tenth highest mountain in the world, was the first of the fourteen eight-thousand metre peaks to be summited, and has the highest death rate of the world's highest mountains.
Annapurna I: south face
Height:
All six of the mountains in the Annapurna massif stand above 7,200 metres, but only Annapurna I can be counted in the group of peaks measuring over 8,000 metres, the fourteen Eight-thousanders. Annapurna's summit comes in at 8,091 metres, making it the tenth highest mountain in the world. It is also considered an Ultra, or Ultra prominent peak, meaning it has a topographic prominence of over 1,500 metres. At 2,984 metres, Annapurna is ranked 95th in topographic prominence.
First Ascent:
In 1950, a French expedition lead by Maurice Herzog with eight other men set out to climb Annapurna, with Herzog and Louis Lachenal successfully reaching the peak on 3 June. The two-week epic summit retreat proved more difficult due to a series of poor choices and bad luck. Four climbers were forced to bivouac in a crevasse with a single sleeping bag. This, combined with inappropriately light footwear and the loss of Herzog's gloves, resulted in severe frostbite for both summiters. The consequent gangrene forced the expedition doctor to perform amputations on the mountain without anesthetic. The two climbers lost all their toes and Herzog most of his fingers.
Like many great climbing stories, a good deal of controversy surrounds the first ascent of Annapurna, most recently and thoroughly examined in climber/author David Robert's True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna. Before the team even left for Nepal, Herzog had his fellow climbers sign a contract forbidding them from publishing anything on the climb for five years. This allowed Herzog to provide the first account of the expedition through his widely read Annapurna, raising him to the status of national hero while his partners, Lachenal in particular, received little, if any, recognition for their accomplishments. Even reading Annapurna at a young age, I remember having such strong emotions towards the two climbers - disgust for Herzog's blind ambition for the summit and fame, reverence for Lachenal's personal sacrifice in, despite better judgement, pushing for the summit with Herzog, effectively keeping him from death. After Lachenal's death, Herzog actively sought to suppress the publication of Lachenal's own expedition diaries in an attempt to preserve the legend of France's great ascent of Annapurna. In 1996, Lachenal's journals in their entirety, as well as a biography of another team member, was published creating greater controversy as much of these accounts of the climb paint a dramatically different picture from Herzog's. The expedition, it seems, was not Herzog's heroic tale of courage and cooperation in the face of death.
Death Rate:
Of the 153 ascents on Annapurna, there have been 58 deaths. The mountain has a 42.85% death rate, the highest of any of the eight-thousanders. In Himalayan Quest: No Shortcuts to the Top, American climber Ed Viesturs states, "Annapurna is all about objective danger, it's all about the glacial architecture. There are these big ice cliffs and seracs, and the question is: are the seracs leaning forward or leaning back? It comes down to that." These falling seracs and cornices result in massive, deadly avalanches. In fact, Russian climbing great Anatoli Boukreev, who survived the infamous 1996 Everest disaster, died the following year on Annapurna when an avalanche was triggered by a fallen cornice invisible from the climbing route.
The Mountain
At the end of Annapurna, Herzog wrote, "Annapurna, to which we had gone empty-handed, was a treasure on which we should live the rest of our lives. With this realisation, we turn the page: a new life begins. There are other Annapurna's in the lives of men." While Dee and I won't be bagging any major summits on our adventure, the Circuit will hopefully serve as an Annapurna in our lives.
*My all-time favourite mountain is Nanga Parbat - ninth highest peak, filled with death and danger, first summited by Austrian Hermann Buhl, popularised in Seven Years in Tibet, and packed with lots of amazing stories, many involving climbing superstar Reinhold Messner.
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