Chapter Two

TROUBLED PARADISE

6th-22nd December 1978

‘We saw very high mountains white with snow in many places which certainly is strange for mountains so near the equator.’ So wrote Jan Carstensz the Dutch navigator, in 1623 as he sailed on the Arafura Sea, between New Guinea and Australia. Snow mountains in New Guinea? Nobody believed him when he returned to Holland. Centuries later the mysteries of these mountains are still being unravelled. At 16,020 feet (4,883 metres.), the highest peak in South East Asia and the highest point in the range has been named after him, the Carstensz Pyramid.

At some time during their careers, all great explorers are monomaniacs – imagination seized, they identify with a mountain, a pole, a blank on the map, then gather will and energy together to fling themselves in effort after effort towards it. The history of exploration is punctuated with the intensity of such relationships: Scott and the South Pole, Mallory and Everest, Shipton and Tilman and Nanda Devi, Bauer and Kangchenjunga, Herzog and Annapurna. The Snow Mountains of New Guinea have obsessed two great explorers – A.F.R. Wollaston, who tried to reach the mountains from the south early this century, and the devoted and energetic New Zealander, Philip Temple who, in 1961, became the first explorer to approach from the north. Both were fascinated by the unique isolation of these mountains.

However, even in the late 1970s, very little was known about the Snow Mountains in the mountaineering world. The allure that had attracted Wollaston and Temple was still there. These mountains were far away from the main mountaineering regions, they were difficult of access, usually covered in cloud, and rose from a strange uninhabited plateau surrounded by jungle, swamp and tribes of primitive peoples still living in the Stone Age. In the autumn of 1976, these isolated mountains had slowly begun to take hold of my imagination.

Whilst Joe Tasker and I were climbing the West Wall of Changabang in the Himalayas that autumn, we often talked, during the forty days of cold struggle it took to climb the mountain, about how it would be so much more pleasant to go to a mountain range in the tropics. We longed for the excitement of travel in an unknown land as a change from the lonely black and white struggle of extreme climbing. But it would have to be the right place, with the right person. Half in fun, we made a pact to find two young ladies and go to New Guinea together.

I was lucky, I found the other half of my expedition very quickly. The first public slide-show I gave about Changabang was at Belper High School. The lecture was organised by Hilary Collins, who ran the school’s Outdoor Activities Department. We had met before in 1974, when she attended a course on which I was an instructor at Glenmore Lodge in the Cairngorms. Not long after the lecture we went rock climbing together for the first time, at the Tors in New Mills in Derbyshire. I fell off, clutching a large flake of rock that had come away with my weight. Hilary managed to stop me with the rope after I had fallen thirty feet – a good achievement considering she was only two thirds my weight, and I had nearly hit the ground. It boded well for our relationship. Over the New Year of 1976-77 we went climbing together again in Torridon in North West Scotland. All the girls interested in mountaineering I had met previously seemed either aggressively fanatical, or obscenely healthy, noisy, strong, rosy-cheeked types, inseparable from their anoraks and bobble caps. Hilary was different, and we shared a passion for mountains rather than climbing for competition or health. She had a common-sense, hard working practicality that I lacked. We were compatible. She was talking about going on a trip to the Himalayas when I suggested she came to New Guinea with me. She agreed. Then she started a new job, teaching geography and biology at a private school in Switzerland.

On the 9th January, 1977, I began writing a lot of letters – to Papua New Guinea, Australia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, America, West Germany and Holland, with the intention of following up all leads and of piecing together, like a jigsaw, a picture of the Snow Mountains of New Guinea. I devoured all expedition reports and all the books I could find on the area: Pygmies and Papuans by A.F.R. Wollaston, Nawok! by Philip Temple, I Come From the Stone Age by Heinrich Harrer and Equatorial Glaciers of New Guinea by Melbourne University. I also read many evangelical books by American Fundamentalist Protestant missionaries, describing their work in the highlands around the mountain. Unfortunately, the most comprehensive books were written in Dutch, including the tantalising To the Eternal Snow of the Tropical Netherlands by Dr A.H. Colijn. This book described the 1936 Dutch expedition to the mountains and had very useful aerial photographs. All this research was immensely satisfying. New Guinea was completely outside my previous expedition experience, and every piece of information I gleaned and stored was, for me, a little inroad into a dark unknown.

On 17th January, Dougal Haston, with whom I had climbed on Everest, was killed in an avalanche whilst skiing above the village of Leysin in Switzerland. The mountaineering politics I was involved in at the time, in my work for the British Mountaineering Council, suddenly seemed petty when I heard the news. I went to Dougal’s funeral. By coincidence, the school where Hilary was working was in the next valley, and she was able to meet me at the station in Leysin. The service, the coffin, the grave, the blue sky, deep snow and the mountains, and my walk away, hand in hand with Hilary beneath the tall trees, all combined to make one of the saddest, most moving days of my life. I had come as a pilgrim, to reaffirm a faith in extreme mountaineering, but felt only doubt. Many people said that Dougal had been doomed — that he was an Ahab after a White Whale, that his life had a restless, fanatic pace, and that he had been bound, sooner or later, to over-reach himself. To me he had seemed indestructible, and his death was a sudden shock. Nevertheless, our New Guinea plans were a comfort, for they were a step off the conveyor belt of a career of a professional high-altitude mountain gladiator, and a step towards a wider emotional development.

At Easter we met Jack Baines, the leader of RAF Valley Mountain Rescue team in North Wales. Jack had been to the Snow Mountains in 1972. An effusive talker, he was positively garrulous about New Guinea. It had been the greatest experience of his life. He brought seventeen hours of tape recordings and, as he bubbled a commentary, his enthusiasm caught us and we absorbed his every word like blotting paper. Jack kindled in us a fire of enthusiasm for the Snow Mountains that was to burn steadily for the many frustrating months that were to pass before we finally saw them. We planned our departure for July 1977 and, as time passed, our New Guinea file became thicker. The mountains were appearing in my dreams. However, I would never really be able to believe in their existence until I saw them for myself.

New Guinea is divided into two halves – Irian Jaya and Papua New Guinea – by the 1410 line of longitude. The highest mountains, and the only mountains with glaciers, lie in the western half, Irian Jaya, which used to be a Dutch colony but is now controlled by Indonesia. The whole of the area is under military control and previous expeditions advised that we would have to keep a very low profile and travel as tourists, rather than as an ‘official’ mountaineering expedition. I wrote to the British Embassy in Jakarta asking about access to Irian, and within a few days the whole situation was taken out of my hands. One of the staff at the Embassy, coincidentally, was organising an eleven-man joint Indonesian-British expedition to the mountains at the same time, and Hilary and I were embraced into their ranks. The Deputy Chief of the Armed Forces of Indonesia had agreed to be the expedition’s patron. Since most of the positions of power in Indonesia are held by army officers, it seemed that all our problems were solved.

On the 6th June, however, our expedition was cancelled. Apparently there had been some trouble in Irian Java, and outsiders were not welcome. A proposed visit by the American Ambassador to the copper mine south of the mountains had been cancelled. Most of the missionaries in the interior had been flown out.

Quickly we changed our plans and spent a month climbing in Kenya and Tanzania, reaching the summits of Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro. This, however, was mere ‘tropical training’, compared to our determination to go to the Snow Mountains of New Guinea. We planned another attempt to reach the area during Hilary’s Christmas holidays in December, 1978. There is no settled weather season in Irian, but we hoped that this choice of date would give time for political problems to calm down. For seventeen months we traced and contacted people for first, second and third-hand reports of what was happening in Irian Jaya, and kept our eyes on the papers. Reports were conflicting. While the Indonesian government said its troops in West Irian were merely settling tribal disputes ‘over trifling matters like dowries, cattle and women,’ the Free Papua Movement was claiming the Indonesian Air Force had napalmed the jungle villages which gave the guerrillas their chief support. It did not help us that the Carstensz Pyramid was so near the Freeport copper mine at Ertsberg, a prime target for guerilla attack. We were told it had had its pipeline blown up in 1977 and a helicopter shot down.

By November,...