Second Time Lucky: Pre-Expedition Round Up (Hardwear Sessions)

By Pat Deavoll

As a sequel to last year's great fun but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to make the first ascent of Beka Brakkai Chhok (6940m) in the Baltar Glacier region, Northern Pakistan, I'm heading off on May 31 to have another go at the mountain, thanks in part to some very generous sponsorship form Mountain Hardwear.

To fill you in on the background .....last year (2007) Lydia Bradey (of first-woman-to-climb-Everest-without-oxygen fame ) and I were lucky enough to secure a rather large financial grant from 'Sport and Recreation New Zealand' allowing us to organise a two woman assault on Beka Brakkai Chhok (BBC).

I won't go into too much detail on the in and outs of the expedition, other than to say we came to a halt at 6000m but had an awesome time and ended up making a first ascent of a smaller mountain we called Wahine (5800m) with two gorgeous Italian men (Giampi and Lorenzo Corona) who had also failed on their chosen peak. What more can two girls ask for!

You can read an amusing account of the trip Lydia wrote for the New Zealand Alpine Club Annual Bulletin on my blog site, www.patdeavoll.co.nz ,and an essay I did on the experience in the 'Essays and Reflections' section of Hardwear Sessions.

This year I'm attempting BBC with Malcolm Bass from England. Malcolm is a great mate and really talented climber and bastard 'ard! On the mountain he hardly wears any clothes and never feels the cold! We met in Alaska in '02, again in '03, then organised an expedition together to the Indian Gharwal in 2004, then last met up in Western China in October 2006 to make the much coveted first ascent of Haizi Shan. I think we were the eleventh expedition to try the peak! You can read both of our climbing resumes on my blog.

Anyway, a bit about our mountain of the moment...Beka Brakkai Chhok (6940m)

Beka Brakkai Chhok is located in the Batura massif, a sub-range of the Karakoram mountains in the Gilgit district of the 'northern areas' of Pakistan, west of the Hunza valley. The Batura massif is the westernmost sub-range of the Karakoram; it runs from Chalt village, in Bar valley on the east, to Kampir Dior in the Kurumbar valley. This valley separates the Pamir and Hindu Kush ranges from the Karakoram. The highest peak in the range is Batura Sar (7795m). BBC lies a few kilometers to the west of Batura Sar, and very close to Batura II, highest unclimbed mountain in the world. The grid reference for the peak is 36 32 50N, 74 25 15E.

This year Malcolm and I intend to take a different approach to climbing BBC than Lydia and I, although we will use the same route (the south face). Lydia and I spent a lot of time acclimatising on the mountain itself which involved hours of approach from Base Camp on a rather unforgiving stretch of glacier. This was a bit of a mistake in retrospect. Malcolm and I intend to acclimatize on Ha Chhish (5100m) directly above our base camp, and then Baktoshi Peak (5900m), and possibly the lower slopes of Batura II (7500m), also very close by. The idea is not to approach BBC until we have acclimatised to around 6200m, avoiding all the exhausting and time wasting glacier travel.

We have enlisted Nazir Sabir Expeditions to organise the logistics of the trip again. Last year they were fantastic, and we had the most wonderful 'guide/liason' with us called Shulkar Allah Baig. The great news is Baig is going to be with us again and this is very reassuring (as last year we had a major porter strike and without Baig, Lydia and I would have been stymied!)

I will be writing regular updates on the expeditions for this blog (I hope)..by text, so expect spelling mistakes!