IV

July/August 1995. K2.

Move fast. Alison Hargreaves would love nothing more, but she knows, as any climber does, that’s not up to her. “The mountain tells you how fast you move,” says Peter Hillary. A big mountain means acclimatizing. The higher the altitude, the less the oxygen. Even the fittest climbers must go through the same process for their bodies to adjust. At the end of June, Hargreaves carries gear to Camp I, then heads back to basecamp. A few days later, it’s the same drill to Camp II. And so on. All the while her respiratory system is working harder, her heart rate is up, and gradually she’s producing more red blood cells to carry oxygen. The hardest part of Hargreaves’s acclimatizing isn’t the trudging up and down between camps. It’s the weather. It’s perfect. A rarity for K2 and, and as she watches sunny day after sunny day, she knows very well that if her body was ready she’d likely be standing at the summit.

In mid-July, just as Hargreaves becomes acclimated, the weather turns. Snow. Wind. “The monsoon hit,” says Johnston. “An especially bad year.” For 11 straight days it storms, dumping over three feet of snow at basecamp and making the rest of the mountain impassable. Like all of the climbers in a holding pattern, Hargreaves finds ways to kill time. She rests, reads, and makes the rounds. And as the conversations get deeper, it becomes clear that the mother of two is struggling with far more than boredom. “She was very clearly torn about being away from her kids,” says Johnston. “Conflicted about being there.”

There with nothing to do but think. Remember the lazy afternoons playing with Tom and Kate at the Meerbrook Lea house in Derbyshire. The summer she spent climbing with them in the Alps. Or the months at Everest basecamp in 1994, where she can still picture Tom in his red bandana and sunglasses, playing with his toy cars. And of course, the radio message she sent from the summit of Mount Everest. To Tom and Kate, my dear children, I am on the highest point in the world and I love you dearly. Hargreaves does what she can to stay connected. Although Slater’s team doesn’t have a satellite phone, the nearby Dutch team does, and every day Hargreaves is at basecamp she coughs up $5 a minute to call home and share a few precious words with her children. But it’s not enough. Often she cries alone in her tent. I really want to cuddle Tom and Kate and be with them, she writes. I dream of Scotland and the children and to have a home once more.

Yet Hargreaves feels more than sadness. “There’s so much guilt,” says Hilaree Nelson, captain of the North Face Global Athlete Team and also a mother of two boys. “When I’m on an expedition I think of them always. Constantly. Sometimes it’s paralyzing.” Hargreaves’s guilt, ironically, has only been compounded by her accomplishments. “The English put mountaineers on pedestals,” explains Johnston. “After Everest she went from a being just a good female climber to a celebrity overnight.” When she arrived back in the UK, Hargreaves made TV appearances. Met the queen. Was flooded with publicity—not all of it good. London-based columnist Nigella Lawson wrote: “I have no time for people who risk their life in a vainglorious attempt to be praised for courage. Everywhere there are people in real danger, who live— though not for long—in famine, at war, with terminal cancer. If the Alison Hargreaveses of this world really value life so little maybe we should not worry on their behalf if they lose it.” 

What’s lost on Lawson is that Hargreaves doesn’t get her kicks tempting fate. She’s no adrenaline junkie. In fact, if a climber is feeling adrenaline surging, something has likely gone very wrong. Yes, there is risk. Calculated risk. Managed risk. But that omnipresent risk forces climbers to push their limits physically, mentally, and emotionally. It requires them to be completely present and continually test themselves in ways that they never can experience in everyday living. “I don’t have a death wish,” says Nelson. “I have a life wish. And I want to live and share that with my kids.”

So Hargreaves waits. And waits. She makes one hurried attempt for the summit but after spending a night at Camp IV, at 25,600 feet, the weather forces her back down to The Strip. As July turns to August she is reaching a breaking point. Climbing K2 is very important to me but I can’t keep waiting and waiting, she writes on August 5th. Maybe I’ve failed here, I’ve worked hard but somehow it’s not come together. It eats away at me—wanting the children and wanting K2—I feel like I’m being pulled in two. Maybe they’d be happier if Mum was around but maybe summiting K2 will help me make a better future for them. Long term having me back safe and sound is surely more important?

She is scheduled to leave basecamp for England the next morning.

V

January 31st, 2019. Nanga Parbat basecamp.

Ballard returns to basecamp after a disheartening week. An avalanche at Camp 111 has swept away 10,000 Euros worth of equipment including two tents, two sleeping bags, dozens of carabiners and ice screws, ropes, a down suit, some gloves, and a pair of mats. The worst loss is manpower. After a throat infection ends Rahmat Baig’s expedition, Karim Hayat quits in a panic. “Something has changed inside him,” Nardi told a Russian climbing website. “More than once he said, ‘I don’t want to lose my life on this mountain.’”

Hayat can’t be blamed for jumping ship. Temperatures reaching 65 degrees below, winds regularly blowing at 100 miles per hour, snow falling by the foot, avalanche dangers skyrocketing. Low barometric pressure means less oxygen than warmer months. “It’s like being at Somme in the trenches,” says filmmaker Sean Smith who survived Nanga Parbat in winter in the early nineties. “Totally hardcore. You need constant vigilance and monitoring of your body and conditions because something bad can happen very quickly.” Just last winter, seasoned climbers Elisabeth Revol and Tomasz Mackiewicz attempted The Killer Mountain. Only Revol came home.

If that’s not bad enough, toss in the effects of high altitude. Exhaustion, migraines, insomnia, nausea, endless coughing, freezing extremities from the lack of oxygen. “It feels like you have a perpetual hangover,” says The North Face team climber Emily Harrington. Acclimatizing can only help so much. And once you’re in  the “death zone” above 26,000 feet? There is no acclimatizing. At that altitude the body starts to cannibalize itself. Cells die. Muscles atrophy. Judgment evaporates.

The Poles, renowned for their winter mountaineering, call it “the art of suffering.” Ballard knows a little bit about the art. In December 2015, while tackling Cima Grande di Lavaredo in northern Italy (the first of his "Starlight and Storm" project) he summited the north face much later than planned. He had no tent, no food, no extra layers of clothing. Too dark to descend safely, Ballard had to spend the winter solstice—the longest night of the year—on an overhang, exposed to the brutal winds and meat-locker temperatures. At first light he made it down.

“You make us worry,” said his girlfriend Stefania Pederiva. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” replied Ballard, despite the frostbite that would earn him a trip to the hospital.  “Fine, fine. Just the toes.”

Now, Ballard is no masochist. He isn’t crazy. In fact he’s a pretty normal 30-year-old. He loves classic rock—the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Clapton. He’s read his favorite book, T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, at least a dozen times. When he’s not climbing or driving somewhere to climb or talking about climbing he’s probably eating—although no meat or fish, ever. “He had a normal British sense of humor,” says his sister Kate. “Much more placid than dad and I. Like mum.” On the mountain, he couldn’t be a better teammate. “He had a very quiet personality,” recalls Baig. At basecamp, Ballard drinks his green tea and eats energy bars and chocolate and they all watch adventure films together. Heading up and down the mountain, he breaks trail, hauls gear and handles the intolerable conditions without a word.

That suffering is an essential part of being in those mountains. Being on Nanga Parbat. And there, in the harsh beauty at the edge of existence, climbers find meaning. Self-knowledge. They learn far more than they do amidst the creature comforts of the modern world. “I used to think there was something wrong with me that I liked suffering, liked things hard,” says Hilaree Nelson. “Now I understand that going through those things, pushing past and being physically strong and mentally strong—that’s when I overcome the suffering and get to the flip side. That’s where you find a greater depth of appreciation of people you’re climbing with, the sunrise, all the little things that make climbing special to me.”

Despite enduring the weather, the work, and the setbacks, Ballard is undeterred. Remains positive. “Being in the mountains was all that mattered to him,” says his sister. Later that day he posts one of six Facebook updates he will make on Nanga Parbat. We are more determined than ever. Our quest continues...

VI

August 6th, 1995. K2 basecamp.

She changes her mind. Again. Those two worlds pulling her apart down to the last agonizing moment. Hargreaves decides she will not leave as planned with Scott Johnston. “It was on again, off again every ten minutes,” says Johnston. “But she decided to stay with Rob.” It’s a choice that has as much to do with family as it does with the mountain itself.

Hargreaves was just a teenager when she met Jim Ballard. Still a teenager when they moved in together. And from the looks of it they appeared a good match. They are both obsessed with climbing. Revel in the outdoors. But behind closed doors Ballard was also manipulative and controlling. Her diary revealed how that psychological abuse sometimes turned physical. Being kicked during a fight in 1983. Beat up during a row in 1987. Jim’s hit me on too many occasions now, she wrote after an assault in March 1989. I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve nowhere else to go—all my life has gone into a house and home here. To make matters worse, recession in the late eighties decimated Ballard’s business. By early 1993, their car had been repossessed, their phone disconnected and there was not even money to pay for heating fuel. Within months they would lose their Meerbrook Lea house.

If Hargreaves could summit the world's three highest mountains by summer’s end it would mean far more than making history. It would translate into sponsorships and book deals and paid appearances. It would mean financial independence and the chance to start a new life as a single mother. She could take on less risk and spend more time with her kids. The other climbers on the mountain that August morning don’t know that getting to the summit of K2 isn’t just a way up for Hargreaves; it’s a way out.

So she and Rob Slater, the only two climbers left from his expedition, tweak their plans. “They joined our team,” says Peter Hillary. He happily obliges, figuring they would all share resources, shovel snow, help put up some more fixed rope. While waiting for the weather to break, Hargreaves joins in games of Frisbee golf, strategizes about the fastest way to scale notorious K2 fixtures like the Black Pyramid and The Bottleneck, and shares stories about Tom and Katie. “She missed them so greatly,” says Hillary.

After a few days, finally some good luck. The sun shines. The wind relents. Hargreaves, Slater, and the Kiwis leave basecamp for the southeast ridge, better known as the Abruzzi Spur. After a night at Camp II and a grueling job of digging out and rebuilding Camp III, the group trudges upward to Camp IV on The Shoulder, a broad, softly-sloped sheet of snow and ice. Totally exhausted, they recuperate in anticipation for the final push. But they cannot stay very long. At 26,000 feet they are at the edge of the death zone. 

At 2AM on the morning of August 13th, the climbers set out. It is bitterly cold, but clear. Ascending this last 2,500 feet or so—less than a half-mile—takes 16 hours. At approximately 6:3oPM, Alison Hargreaves stands at the top of K2, exactly three months to the day that she did the same on Mount Everest. 

VII

Late February, 2019. Nanga Parbat basecamp.

Life on Nanga Parbat is simple. When Ballard and Nardi are stuck at basecamp they shovel snow, watch movies, shovel more snow, play chess, read, shovel even more snow, send e-mails, talk, and when weather permits, Ballard practices dry-tooling on a boulder they have named “Big Mattia.” When they are up on the mountain at Camps II, III, and IV, they spend their waking hours shoveling snow, fixing rope, climbing, shoveling even more snow, crawling into the tiny tent they share, heating their little stove, melting snow, having tea, forcing down a few bites of food, melting more snow, drinking water, then stuffing themselves into their sleeping bags, all the while trying to forget that it feels like they’re locked inside the world’s largest freezer.

Ballard likes this life. This simplicity. It’s evident in the way he climbs, the French Dry Tooling Style (DTS), which means no fancy figure-four or figure-nine moves, third grips on an ice axe, or extended ice tools. Some consider it to be the sport's purest form. It’s also in the way he lives. Until recently, home has been a white VW van he shares with his father. The pair travel around from campsite to campsite in the Alps so Tom can climb. They cook pasta, beans, and soup on a hot plate. Read at night by headlamp. Scraping by on Jim’s pension. Striving to remain uncomplicated in an increasingly complicated modern world. Tom calls this his “old school” approach to both climbing and life. It’s much like the alpinists who used to make due with minimal equipment. How they accomplished big things with very little.

A good part of him likes this winter life on Nanga Parbat more than civilian life. True, up here he misses Stefania and his dad. Yet he’s the first to admit he’s not a very social person. His struggle isn’t scaling rock walls or ice towers or this frozen tundra but with the everydayness of the world. Grocery shopping, answering mail, running errands. He once told a reporter how climbing is an escape from normal life. How it’s the opposite of courage. How one could argue that it requires much more courage to stay down in the “real” world.

Maybe there is more to his stripped-down, monastic existence of endless climbing. Maybe it’s a way of staying near his mother. It’s why he still uses her ice axes. Why he stores his equipment in her old plastic barrels. Why in 2010, he started putting together a solo expedition to try and become the first person to summit K2 in winter. And why he’s never stopped dreaming of it. “I feel closer to my mother in the mountains,” he once told an interviewer. “I feel that she guides my path. When I go to K2 I will feel that I’ve been there before … the physical challenge may not be as difficult to come to terms with, because I’ve already been there.”

VIII

There are a lot of ways to die on an 8,000-meter peak. Avalanches, frostbite, falling rock and ice, slipping off a ledge, pitching into a crevasse, pulmonary edema, cerebral edema, stroke, heart attack, hypoxia. But like boxers, bullfighters, and race car drivers, veteran mountaineers don’t think about death. It’s there, in the abstract. Yet they trust themselves to make the right choices, to use the keen judgment that’s kept them alive this long. Of course it doesn’t always work. Mountains have claimed the lives of many great mountaineers. And when it does happen, sometimes there aren’t survivors left to tell the story of what went wrong.

As Hargreaves looked out at the Karakoram Range from atop K2, a fast-moving, freakish windstorm from China was throttling the base of the mountain and making its way up. “It was terrifying,” says Hillary, who’d turned back near The Bottleneck at 24,600 feet. “The winds must have gusting and blowing around 100 knots. It was out of control.” The following afternoon, two Spanish climbers who’d barely survived the storm in a tent at Camp IV, spotted a boot, a dark violet anorak and a harness that belonged to Hargreaves. Both the anorak and the harness were stained with blood, as was a track of snow above the gear. “At 8,000 meters with the jet stream the wind could have easily have been 200 miles per hour,” says Scott Johnston. Was Hargreaves simply blown off the mountain? None of the five climbers with her at the time could give an account because they all died as well.

As for Ballard, for the first few days after he and Nardi had gone dark, their basecamp team assumed the best. It was too cloudy to spot them through binoculars. And they were likely in a location that had no signal for their satellite phone. But by February 28th, a search and rescue operation was in motion. A team of veteran climbers attempting K2 was helicoptered in to help. A week later, a photo confirmed the worst. Two bodies, attached by a rope, lying lifeless in a gulley at 19,356 feet on the Mummery Spur. Nardi in an orange jacket, and a few feet below, Ballard in blue. An avalanche? A fall? Exposure? No one can say for sure. But one thing about their deaths is certain. The two of them—mother and son—spent much of their lives trying to get closer to each other. And in a sense they’ve done that. Fallen climbers are rarely, if ever, recovered from the major peaks, and today Alison Hargreaves and Tom Ballard’s bodies still lie where they died, less than 120 miles apart.