Looking Forward to Jankuth (Hardwear Sessions)

By Patricia Deavoll, Expedition Sponsorship Recipient

It's a typical late summer's afternoon in the hills above Christchurch ( that's the South Island of New Zealand) - the sky is blue, a brisk nor' easterly whisks in off the sea, the waves and distant mountains sparkle. I'm doing my typical later summer afternoon thing- cragging with friends at one of the dozens of sport climbing locations above the city.

I've just led the warm up climb (a short overhanging test-piece with good holds). I'm chatting with my belayer Nick as I thread the ring anchor for a lower-off. Eric is a few meters away on another climb belayed by Tony. Dave is somewhere round the bottom and there are other climbing pairs dotted up and down the crag. Someone is drinking from a thermos of coffee- I can smell it. People in white are playing cricket on the playing field below- their calls carry on the wind. This is groundhog afternoon- we've all been here before hundreds and hundreds of times.

"OK take me!" I call to Nick and lean back for the rope to take my weight. I hold it at my waist. It runs quickly- too quickly- through my hands! I'm falling and I hit the ground with a ker-thump! And lie there stunned... Then I realise "God! Ow! My back hurts."

Somewhere above me I hear voices saying "F*k! Oh f*k!" Then Eric says stay still, don't move. I open my eyes and see my left hand lying six inches away, the skin on the inside of the fingers completely rope-shredded. Eric asks me to move my hands and feet and head and I find I can. I think desperately "Please don't get a helicopter," and ask Eric to wrap something round my hand (it's Tony's tee-shirt) so I don't have to look at it. I stand up slowly. My back is excruciating but I grit it out because I really REALLY don't want that helicopter. I can see the others rolling their eyes at each other and breathing sighs of relief as I maintain the vertical and start to totter towards the road...

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Two hours and several injections of morphine later, I'm in Accident and Emergency and a clutch of doctors is approaching with my x-ray. The morphine seems to have done nothing and I'm teary with the pain and wanting to call my boyfriend. "You've broken your back," a doctor says matter-of-factly as if this happens to just everybody all the time. "Compressed and fractured your L2. You are extremely lucky there's no spinal chord damage. You need to be admitted." But hang on hang on! Admitted for how long? And how long do broken backs last? And what about Jankuth! Oh crap!

Jankuth, for the uninitiated, is a 6805m mountain at the head of the Gangotri Glacier in the Indian Garwhal. Remote, beautiful, technical...and unclimbed. It should really have been climbed in 2004; a fellow Kiwi Marty Beare, Brits Malcolm Bass, Paul Figg, Andy Brown and I had a go at the first ascent. Marty and I got to around 6500m before retreating in bad weather. The other three, trying another route, reached 6000m. This was after a three day walk into the base camp on the Sudenbum meadow, followed by a long and exhausting carry for 17km to the head of the glacier, without porter support, to establish our advanced base camp. It was unfinished business, for sure which is why Malcolm Bass and I intend to make another attempt in September this year. With the support of Mountain Hardwear, who have yet again (so many thanks!) backed me. No one else has tried Jankuth in the interim. Its remoteness seems to deter climbers (why struggle up the longest glacier in the Himalayas when there's Shivling only two days walk in from the road end!)

In 2007, I made a first ascent of a mountain close to Jankuth with Bruce Norman and we made the canny decision to sneak our way up the slopes Kedar Dome to acclimatise before heading up glacier. Acclimatising close to basecamp means not have to carry as much food up valley, anything to lighten those loads. Malcolm and I will apply the same approach this year. We've learnt from the mistakes we made on the last expedition and we are quietly confident!

Patricia Deavoll

Pat high on the west face.

Camp on the summit ridge

Camp on the summit ridge-2004.jpg

It's been two weeks since my accident and I'm out of hospital, at home in a back brace which will be my constant companion for another month. I can't do a lot, but I must be getting better because I'm getting restless. The expedition is six months away. What better incentive for allowing myself every opportunity to recover. I'll rest, eat well and do whatever it takes to be ready for this trip. I really want this mountain. I'm confident I can do this.

In the meantime I have an important lesson to dwell on. When you are at the top of a sport climb, and you're threading the anchor for a lower-off, don't forget to tie the rope back into your harness!