27^th August: Mystery at the top of the world: Did George Mallory make it to the summit of Everest before he died?

Graham Hoyland argues that he couldn't have – due to a deadly combination of bad weather and worse luck.

His body lay half-buried in the frozen scree, face-down and spread-eagled in his last agony. Above George Mallory, a couple of thousand feet higher, the summit of Everest stood impassively waiting for other men to try to conquer the highest mountain in the world. For me, also, it was the end of a long quest.

At the age of 12, I met my relative Howard Somervell, a friend of George Mallory's who watched him leave on his last attempt to climb the mountain in June 1924. Somervell told me about his own attempt to climb the mountain without oxygen, and how he nearly suffocated due to a frostbitten larynx. He turned back 1,000 feet from the top.

"We met Mallory at the North Col on his way up. He said to me that he had forgotten his camera, and I lent him mine. 'So if my camera was ever found,'" he said, 'you could prove that Mallory got to the top.'" It was a throwaway remark, which he probably made a hundred times in the course of telling this story, but this time it found its mark.

I spent years trying to prove Mallory had climbed the mountain and became the 15th Briton to climb the mountain, in 1993. In 1999, I organised a BBC-funded expedition to look for Somervell's camera. Instead the searchers found Mallory's body. There was no camera, though, and still no answer to the biggest mystery in mountaineering: who climbed Mount Everest first?

I kept searching for new evidence, and went on eight Everest expeditions searching for Andrew Irvine, Mallory's young companion. In 2006, I tested perfect replicas of Mallory's clothing and deduced that they would have kept him alive on the summit only if the weather remained fine. However, the answer to the puzzle was under my nose the whole time.

Somervell was responsible for the meteorological records on the 1924 expedition, and his work led me to the vital clue. One of the reasons Mount Everest is now becoming easier to climb is modern weather forecasting. Whereas the early British attempts relied on rough dates for the likely advent of the Indian summer monsoon, now the expedition leader has highly accurate satellite photographs and forecasting available by email. The weather window needed for a summit bid can be predicted with reliability.

But there is one variable that is literally invisible: air pressure. If one tries to climb Everest without supplementary oxygen there are some days better than others: high-pressure days, when there are more oxygen molecules in each lungful of breath. Conversely, a day with low barometric pressure may effectively make the summit a few hundred metres higher. A climber nearing the summit without extra oxygen is working at the absolute limit of human capacity, and the difference of a few millibars of atmospheric pressure can make all the difference. Even when you are using oxygen it is merely supplementing the ambient air, so low pressure will affect you, too. A recent study of fatalities on Everest shows that deaths blamed on the weather are usually associated with a big drop in summit barometric pressure. Mallory had oxygen but it had almost certainly run out before he had time to reach the top.
 
In my reading of the 1924 expedition account I became curious about the unseasonably bad weather throughout the May of that year. The expedition report quotes Darjeeling tea planters as saying that "for at least 20 years, no such weather had been known at this season". Usually the cold winds of winter die down towards the end of April and there is a clear week or so around 17 May. But in 1924, the weather was so appalling between 9 and 11 May that Mallory and Irvine had to abandon Camp III below the North Col, something unheard-of in recent seasons. I wondered whether there was an outside event which might have influenced the weather, and in particular whether El Niño might have been the culprit.

At first glance, a movement of warm water in the tropical Pacific from its usual home off Indonesia across to the coast of South America might not seem likely to have an impact on conditions at the top of Everest. But El Niño, which happens around Christmas every few years, causes atmospheric pressure changes that go hand in hand with the movement of the warm water, an effect known as the Southern Oscillation. It is this that affects global weather; in particular drought in South Africa, increased Eurasian snowfall and a reduced Indian summer monsoon.

This fits the facts: there was a drought in South Africa in 1924 that was recorded as one of the eight worst in the 20th century. And Mallory's expedition report describes how there was increased snowfall in Tibet in May that year and that the monsoon arrived late, enabling Mallory and Irvine to make a late attempt.

The 1924 expedition was remarkable for collecting the earliest data on the meteorology of the Mount Everest region. The air pressure (barometric pressure) was also recorded at Base Camp. Somervell's meteorological data from the 1924 expedition was published in 1926 but it was largely ignored until the Canadian meteorologist Professor Moore analysed the storm that one of Mallory's companions described as "a rather severe blizzard". It probably killed Mallory and Irvine. There was an 18mbar drop in barometric pressure at Base Camp during this storm. This huge drop suggests that the conditions during their summit attempt were much more severe than originally assumed and therefore the appalling weather may well have contributed to their deaths.
 
Seventy-two years later, another disaster was just about to happen. On the evening of 9 May 1996, a large number of clients and guides were poised to make summit attempts having climbed from the Nepalese Base Camp to the camp on the South Col at 8,000 metres (26,240 feet). There had been high winds all day and the chances of summiting appeared low. The winds died down during the evening, though, and the decision was made to attempt to summit.During the afternoon of 10 May, however, an intense storm with wind speeds estimated to be in excess of 70 miles per hour, heavy snowfall, and falling temperatures, engulfed Mount Everest, trapping more than 20 climbers on its exposed upper slopes. Eight of the climbers died; the highest number to die during a single event near the summit of Mount Everest. The winter of 1995-96 was an El Niño year, too.

Using Somervell's barometric readings, the minimum summit barometric pressure was approximately 331mbar during the 1924 storm. It was the same figure during the 1996 storm. A change in summit barometric pressure of just 4mbar is sufficient to trigger hypoxia (lack of oxygen). Clearly both storms were associated with summit barometric pressures and pressure drops that were sufficient to drive the climbers into a hypoxic state. The pressure drop was larger and occurred more quickly in 1924, suggesting that it may have been even worse than the 1996 "Into Thin Air" storm. In 1924, the summit barometric pressure fell from 341mbar on 6 June to 331mbar on 9 June, a drop of approximately 10mbar. The 1996 storm saw the pressure fall from 337mbar on 7 May to 331 mbar on 12 May, a drop of approximately 6 mbar.

This led me to realise there was an even more seductive and invisible danger at work. Mallory had seen Norton and Somervell get to within 1,000 feet of the top on 4 June using no oxygen equipment. It would seem reasonable to assume that the summit was possible to reach with the apparatus. What he didn't know was that the rapidly falling air pressure was effectively making the mountain higher, and that the incoming blizzard was going to make his clothing very thin indeed.

When I digested these results, I reluctantly had to change an opinion I had held for 30 years. If these figures were true, and if the 1924 blizzard was indeed even worse than that of 1996, then there was no way in which Mallory and Irvine, dressed in their marginal clothing, could have reached the summit of Mount Everest on that fatal day.
 
Graham Hoyland has written a book about his quest, 'Goodbye to Everest', which is due to be published in May 2011. For more information, go to www.grahamhoyland.com

Source: TheIndependent.co.uk

25^th August: Briton Killed on Route to Everest

Doctors struggled Wednesday to identify the remains of 14 people, including six foreign tourists, who were killed in a plane crash while heading to the Mount Everest region in heavy rain.

The remains, flown to Katmandu by rescue helicopters, were being examined at the Tribhuwan University Teaching Hospital.

Dr. Pramod Shrestha at the hospital said the task of identifying the bodies was difficult because none of the remains was intact.

Shrestha said they were using information provided by family members such as the clothes the victims were wearing, jewelry and body marks.

He said Nepal did not have the technology to identify remains through DNA testing and would have to send samples abroad for any such tests.

The private Agni Air plane heading to the Mount Everest region crashed in heavy rain outside Nepal's capital on Tuesday, killing all 14 people aboard, including four Americans, a Briton and a Japanese.

The German-built Dornier turboprop plane was headed to Lukla, a popular stop for trekkers and mountaineers, when cloud cover there forced it to turn back to the capital. It went down near Shikharpur village, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Katmandu.

Video footage and photos of the crash site released by the army showed a wide ditch made by the impact and the plane broken into small pieces.

Agni Air said all the foreigners were tourists.

The Americans were identified as Irina Shekhets, 30, Leuzi Cardoso, 49, Heather Finch, 40, and Kendra Fallon, 18. The Japanese passenger was Yuki Hayashi, 19, and the Briton was Jeremy Taylor, 30.

The rescue coordination office at Katmandu's Tribhuwan International Airport said soldiers first reached the crash site on foot. The route from the nearest town was blocked by a river flooded by monsoon rains.

Lukla is the only air strip in the Everest region. Thousands of trekkers and mountaineers fly there every year to begin their journey to Everest and surrounding peaks and trekking trails. However, few travel there during the monsoon season. It is little more than a runway carved into the side of the Himalayas at an altitude of 9,200 feet (2,800 meters).

The Dornier 228 twin-turboprop had its first flight in 1981. A total of 270 were built by German planemaker Dornier and India's HAL. About 120 remain in service worldwide.

According to the U.S.-based Aviation Safety Network, 29 have been lost in various accidents, with a total of 122 fatalities.

Source: The Associated Press

23^rd August: Everest Solo Without Oxygen in Autumn

A 28 yr old Japanese resident Nobukazu Kuriki is trying to ascent Mt. Everest alone without oxygen this autumn.

Kuriki said, “It’s been around 40 yrs since a Japanese has climbed Mt Everest.”

Kuriki has already ascended three mountains above 8,000 meters heights. They are Mt Cho Oyu in 2007, Mt Manaslu in 2008, and Mt Dhaulagiri in 2009. Among the 7 peaks, Kuriki has ascended 6 peaks.

Kuriki said, “Youngsters in Japan are more fascinated to technology than nature. Anyway, my effort to ascend Mt Everest will produce thrill among the youngsters to visit Nepal and ascend the Everest.”

Mr. Prachanda Man Shrestha, chief executive officer of Nepal Tourism Board (NTB), passed him the flag of Nepal Tourism Year (NTY) 2011 and a pass to ascend Mt Everest.

Mr. Shrestha said that number of Japanese visitors to Nepal was around 45,000 until some time ago while the number has recently fallen to 20,000 – 25,000. This effort to ascend Everest by a Japanese will certainly help boost Nepal and bring more Japanese visitors this year.

In accordance to NTB, the effort of Kuriki to ascend Everest will be recorded and shown by Tokyo Channel 12.

Mr. Laxman Bhattarai, joint-secretary at the Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation (MoTCA) said, “Kuriki will be charged half of the regular royalty as he is ascending the summit in autumn season. Autumn itself is a tough season and there are little number of reservations made for this season.”

Mr. Bhattarai also notified that the effort to ascend Everest in autumn season will also help boost the season for mountaineering.

Source: Everestjournal.com

19th August: New evidence in Mount Everest mystery

Canadian researchers say they believe they've settled a historic controversy about the first men to conquer the summit of Mount Everest in the Himalayas.

 

One of mountaineering's most fiercely debated arguments is whether Britons George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were the first men to reach the summit when they attempted the climb in 1924, Britain's Daily Telegraph reported.

 

Researchers say they now believe the pair could not have reached the top and died during a severe storm that would have deprived them of oxygen.

 

Weather data collected at the time of the 1924 attempt shows Mallory and Irvine were enveloped in a blizzard that saw oxygen plunge to fatally low levels, scientists at the University of Toronto said.

 

Contemporary reports reveal there was a catastrophic fall in barometric pressure, which would have killed any climbers on the approach to the summit, they say.

 

They calculated the sudden drop in oxygen levels was even greater than one that killed eight climbers on Everest on a single day in May 1996.

 

The findings appear to confirm that New Zealander Sir Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay were the first climbers to scale the 29,035-foot peak in 1953.

 

Source: UPI

18^th August: Another Mallory & Irvine Film

Nomadic Pictures is developing a film called ‘In High Places’ about doomed Mount Everest climber George Mallory, who some people believe made the ascent 20 years before Edmund Hillary. Location scouts are set to come to Alberta in September for a 2011 shoot and Ewan McGregor is rumored to be interested in the lead role.

 

Source: nomadicpictures.com

12^th August: Ed Hillary’s Everest Parka
 

Everest Parka Blue from Nigel Cabourn

 

The Everest parka is based on the exact jacket Sir Edmund Hillary wore during his Antarctic and Everest expeditions during the 1950's.

 

This jacket is made with the utmost care and incredible attention to detail.

 

The outer shell is made from 100% Ventile proofed cotton. This is a British Military cotton woven so tightly making it waterproof but still light and naturally breathable. This fabric was used by the RAF in WW2.

 

The jackets insulation is made from Norwegian duck down and completely hand filled.

 

The jacket also features a tunnel hood with a sheepskin collar and coyote fur trim with an adjustable bracing wire. An adjustable draw cord on the hood with wooden toggles and a cream waist tie. The parka has a two way zip front made from Swiss Riri zippers. A double layer buttoned placket and two front button down patch pockets.

 Photo (C) Nigel Cabourn

 

100% Blue Ventile outer-shell.

Goose down fill.

Sheepskin lined hood with coyote fur tim.

Made in England.

 

£1595

 

Source: Everest Parka Blue from Nigel Cabourn
 

3^rd August: Mallory And Irvine: Did Extreme Weather Cause Their Disappearance?

 

Research Considers Role of Weather in Historic Everest Tragedy.

Their legend has inspired generations of mountaineers since their ill-fated attempt to climb Everest over 80 years ago, and now a team of scientists believe they have discovered another important part of the puzzle as to why George Mallory and Andrew Irvine never returned from their pioneering expedition. The research, published in Weather, explores the unsolved mystery and uses newly uncovered historical data collected during their expedition to suggest that extreme weather may have contributed to their disappearance.

George Mallory and Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine disappeared during their historic 1924 attempt to reach the summit of Everest. The pair were last seen on June 8th on Everest’s Northeast Ridge, before vanishing into the clouds and into the history books. For decades a vigorous debate has raged regarding their climb, their disappearance and if they were successful in reaching the summit.

“The disappearance of Mallory and Irvine is one of the most enduring mysteries of the 20th century, yet throughout the debates surrounding their disappearance the issue of the weather has never really been addressed,” said lead author Professor G.W.K Moore of the Physics Department at the University of Toronto. “Until we completed our study the only information available was an observation by mountaineer Noel Odell, who was climbing behind Mallory and Irvine, who claimed that a blizzard occurred on the afternoon that they disappeared.”

Many writers have since ignored the storm as Odell believed it had only lasted a short time. However the size and extreme height of Everest mean that Odell’s observations have always been difficult to place into context, making the blizzard potentially more significant than first realised.

This latest research focuses on meteorological measurements from the 1924 expedition which the authors uncovered at the Royal Geographical Society library in London. Although the data was published as a table in a 1926 report on the expedition, it was never analysed for information on the disappearance of Mallory and Irvine until this study. “We analysed the barometric pressure measurements and found out that during the Mallory and Irvine summit attempt, there was a drop in barometric pressure at base camp of approximately 18mbar. This is quite a large drop, in comparison the deadly 1996 ‘Into Thin Air’ storm had a pressure drop at the summit of approximately 8 mbar,” said Moore. “We concluded that Mallory and Irvine most likely encountered a very intense storm as they made their way towards the summit.”

“Mount Everest is so high that there is barely enough oxygen near its summit to sustain life and a drop of pressure of 4 mbar at the summit is sufficient to drive individuals into a hypoxic state,” said Dr. John Semple an experienced mountaineer and the Chief of Surgery at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto.

The authors conclude that with the additional stresses they were under with extreme cold, high winds and the uncertainly of their route, the pressure drop and the ensuring hypoxia contributed to the Mallory and Irving’s death.

This research not only contributes a new, and perhaps final, chapter to the Mallory legend, but is also of importance to modern mountain climbers as the same types of storms and hypoxic stresses continue to confront those who take on the world’s great mountains.

The Mallory and Irvine storm serves as both an example and a warning of the magnitude of the pressure drops that can occur and the severe physiological impact they can have.

“Over the 8 decades since Mallory and Irvine died, we have learned a lot about Mount Everest and the risks that climbers attempting to climb it face”, concluded Moore. “The weather is perhaps the greatest unknown and we hope that this line of research will help educate modern climbers as to the risks that they face.”

 

Source: alphagalileo.org

30th July: Everest Summit Views

Excellent video taken from the summit of Mount Everest showing the views on a nice clear morning.

 

22nd July: British Girl has Everest in Her Sights

A Romsey teenager has set her sights on becoming the youngest British woman to climb Mount Everest.

But 18-year-old Becky Bellworthy needs more than £30,000 to realise her dream and is appealing for businesses to sponsor her.

The former BartonPeverilCollege student is on a gap year whilst waiting to take up a place at the University of Southampton to study medicine.

In October she is traveling to the Himalayas to climb the 7,129m Baruntes in preparation for an expedition to Everest in April.

“My expedition is reliant on funding which I am working hard to achieve, mainly by contacting companies.”

“I’ve been training since I was 15 when I first developed the Everest dream. There are places for me on an expedition to Everest, yet I am currently unable to accept them due to the lack of finance.”

“I would be devastated if I had to cancel the expeditions purely because of the lack of funding.”

She hopes to tackle Everest as a member of an expedition to be led by Kenton Cool, who has conquered the mountain eight times.

Becky has recently returned from France after reaching the summit of Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, and the highest mountain she has climbed so far.

“It took me 17 hours to climb MountBlanc, which is 4,810 meters. It was good climb but it was pretty hard work,” said Becky, who lives in the Whitenap area of the town.

Anyone who would like to help Becky realise her dream can email beckbellworthy@hotmail. com or call her on 01794 516941 or 07999 158058.

If Becky secures the backing she needs to reach Everest she then hopes to raise further money in sponsorship for Comic Relief and Romsey Gateway Club.

Source: Romsey Advertiser

17th July: Loss of Ice on Everest

Experts say comparing the 1921 photo (left) with the photo of 2010 proves that the ice mass is disappearing

The Asia Society (AS) arranged for the pictures to be taken in exactly the same place where British climber George Mallory took photos in 1921.
 

At 6pm on August 13, 1995, climber Alison Hargreaves, a Derbyshire mother of two small children, stood on the summit of K2, the world's second-highest mountain.

Elated by her achievement, she began her descent, the beginning of her long road home. An hour or so later, she was dead - blown from the vertiginous summit ridge by a sudden, unexpected hurricane.

Now, 15 years on, her son Tom is planning to attempt the same peak. But though he is just 21, and has never climbed in the Himalayas before, Tom is planning an ascent that, if successful, will catapult him straight into the mountaineering history books.

To the collective astonishment of the British climbing world, unlike his mother - who died with six others having reached the summit in August - Tom intends to make his climb completely alone, in the depths of winter.

Waiting and hoping for his return to base camp on Pakistan's remote Baltoro glacier will be just his father, Jim, his sister, Kate, and the TV documentary-maker Chris Terrill.

I have followed Alison and her family's story for many years, from long before she died, and, along with fellow writer Ed Douglas, published her biography in 1999.

Today, using previously unpublished excerpts from her diaries, I can reveal new details of her personal tragedy - including shocking details of her violent marriage to husband Jim Ballard and why she hoped her audacious attempt on the most dangerous mountain on earth would help her escape from him.

And now, as Tom plans his own assault on the peak that claimed his mother's life, mountain experts explain why they fear that if he goes ahead, the family could be facing another K2 tragedy.

There's little doubt about how dangerous Tom's ambition is. Even in summer, the 28,251ft K2 is known as the 'savage mountain', having claimed more than one death for every four successful ascents. More than one in ten climbers who have reached the summit have died on the way down.

Just two years ago, 11 were killed on a single day. But winter is much tougher. The three previous winter attempts, all composed of large teams of highly experienced climbers, have failed. The most recent, in 2003, was led by the highly-regarded Polish mountaineer Krzysztof Wielicki, the first man on Earth to make a winter ascent of Everest.

K2 in winter, he discovered, is far worse: dispatches from his team describe a relentless bombardment from fierce winds and horrific cold. Wielicki's group fixed thousands of feet of rope to the mountain to create a lifeline to base camp. Climbing alone, Tom will have no such help.

But even with their ropes, the climbers, all tough Eastern Europeans, were lucky to survive. Dariusz Zauski described how he sat up all night inside his tent at 23,000ft with his back braced against the fabric as hurricane winds threatened to tear it from the mountain with him inside. The temperature was close to -40°C, and had the tent failed, he would have frozen to death.

'The descent was difficult, under a hail of avalanches consisting of lumps of ice and stones hitting us with great force,' he commented afterwards. 'K2 showed its claws.'

Despite these odds, Tom, Ballard and Terrill - whose film is the key to financing the project - insist that Tom can succeed.

'I feel closer to my mother in the mountains,' Tom told an interviewer recently. '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.'

Speaking from the family's home in Alpiglen, in the shadow of the Eiger in Switzerland, Jim Ballard last night insisted that the fact that Tom has never climbed anything remotely comparable was irrelevant.

'Tom told me he wanted to go, I told Chris Terrill, he said, "That's great," and that's all there is to it,' he said.

'I try my best, like any father, to support my children. My job, like any parent, is to give whatever help I can. The fact he is interested in going to K2 in winter is his choice. Tom has no interest in climbing K2 in summer, or of being on routes where there are lots of other people.'

Other, more experienced climbers fear that while Tom is plainly a talented mountaineer, with several routes on the Eiger to his credit, his K2 plan may well end in disaster. The Eiger is less than half K2's height, and Tom has never had the chance to test himself in the high altitude 'death zone' above 26,000 feet.

Climbing history is full of examples of mountaineers who perform brilliantly in the Alps, but find it physically impossible to acclimatize to the thin air of a peak like K2 - where the oxygen level at the summit is barely a third of that found at sea level.

'My experience tells me this is extremely foolish,' said veteran climber Doug Scott, who once crawled down the 25,000ft Ogre - in the same range as K2 - with two broken legs and was the first Briton to reach the summit of Everest.

'I've been to K2 base camp four times, and I've collected dead bodies from the bottom that were frozen solid in summer. To try it alone in winter without serving a proper apprenticeship is foolhardy. He has very little chance of success and if he does come back, he will probably be badly frostbitten. 'I can only hope the climb fizzles out as Tom confronts the reality and his survival instincts kick in.'

Yesterday, Jim Ballard dismissed Scott's criticisms, saying he 'was never the world's best technical climber', and had become 'an old man'.

Alan Hinkes, the only Briton to have climbed all 14 mountains higher than 26,246ft (8,000m) and who reached the top of K2 a few weeks before Alison's death, said: 'I was gob smacked when I heard. You can never say something's impossible in mountaineering - good luck to him. But this is barmy. Being on your own in winter doesn't bear thinking about. The weather is just horrendous. To be honest, it's pie in the sky.'

So just what is it that's driving Tom Ballard? Why is he in such a hurry to run this epic risk? After publishing Alison's biography, Regions of The Heart, and contemplating Tom's plans now, I can't avoid a deeply worrying sense of deja vu.

Alison's death on K2, when Tom was only six and his sister, Kate, just four, aroused fierce controversy, with numerous commentators accusing her of callous selfishness. How, they demanded, could a mother with children so young have been willing to put her life in jeopardy?

The answer, derived from dozens of interviews with her family and friends, and access to many of her letters and the daily journals she kept for more than 20 years, is heartbreaking.

It's clear that Alison loved the mountains and was a very capable climber. Her tragedy, however, was that when she really began to push herself in the last three years of her life, her motives had become dangerously mixed.

She wasn't climbing any longer simply for the joy of it, but because she believed that achieving the fame that would come with new, extreme feats was the only way to feed her family. It was also, she thought, the only way to escape her marriage to Jim Ballard.

Alison met him when she was a schoolgirl of 16 and went to work on Saturdays at The Bivouac, a climbing shop he owned near her parents' home in the Derbyshire town of Belper.

Although he was already married and 20 years older, they quickly began a relationship. Within a few months, his marriage was over and, on her 18th birthday in 1980, she moved into his cottage in the hills.

From the outset, her journals suggest, he saw himself as her 'manager', a Svengali-like figure who would realize the potential in the woman he liked to call a 'climbing genius'. Then relatively wealthy, he showered her with gifts.

But to those who knew Alison well, there were warning signs. 'Alison seemed subservient, the skivvy,' her elder sister, Sue, said shortly after Alison's death. 'Jim was incredibly proud he had this attractive younger girl hanging on his arm. But Alison had missed her youth.

'You could see him trying to bring her under his control.'

She had also missed her chance of going to university: according to her journal, Ballard made her choose between college and him. As a result, her only professional qualifications were her skills on rock and ice.

The uglier aspects of Alison's relationship with Ballard were downplayed in the biography because her children were so young when it was published.

But the truth is that from 1983, Alison's journals chronicle a series of assaults, some of them quite shocking. What her critics never understood was that one of the reasons Alison climbed big mountains while a mother was that she was a victim of domestic violence.

At first, her descriptions of these incidents had a painful naivety. 'Home in time for an enormous row and a fite [sic],' she wrote one evening in April 1983. 'I was frightened when I was kicked . . . Upset, cos JB said I didn't look after him when I was tired. I made tea later and washed up.'

As she matured, her awareness and desperation grew. On January 14, 1987, Ballard attacked her because he was late for a meeting and she told him it would be impossible to dig their car out of a snowdrift: 'JB beat me up again today . . . he blew up at me, thumped and kicked me in the snow.'

But like so many women with abusive partners, Alison felt she had no choice but to stay with him. The couple married and had children. There were times of closeness and intimacy, but the arrival of Tom and Kate did not stop the assaults and becoming a mother only intensified Alison's dilemma.

'Jim's hit me on too many occasions now,' she wrote after an assault in March 1989, when Tom was six months old. 'I don't know what to do about it. I've nowhere else to go - all my life has gone into building a house and home here.'

Yesterday, we asked Jim Ballard about Alison's accounts of these assaults. He said: 'It's nothing to do with you, I'm not saying anything. They were her personal diaries, and they were not to be read by outsiders.'

By the end of the Eighties, Alison was frank about the fact that continuing to be a climber was 'tearing me in two'. It didn't 'fit in' with motherhood, and she was coming to realize 'there's other things in this life'.

But she was about to face a new, huge crisis. Ballard's business - the shop and a small climbing equipment factory - was facing bankruptcy, a victim of the recession of the early Nineties. Alison only knew one way to make a living: through the sponsorship, books and films that might accompany her risking her life as a mountaineer.

But in this, she faced stiff competition. In January 1992, she sustained severe frostbite while descending from an unsuccessful attempt to make the first solo female ascent of the north face of the Matterhorn.

Her journal records what happened while she lay recovering in hospital. 'I've just had some of the worst news I could ever have had. Catherine Destivelle [a glamorous French climber and media star whose photo often appeared in magazines like Paris Match] has soloed the Eiger. I want to go outside and scream. I'm such a failure. She succeeded, I failed . . . I've got children, mouths to feed. I feel terrible, shallow, useless.'

Alison's determination to overcome that failure, and so to restore her children to prosperity - by now, the family home had been repossessed - was a critical factor behind her last, daring climbs: solo ascents of the six great north faces of the Alps, followed, amid much media fanfare, by Everest and K2.

Meanwhile, her marriage had apparently reached its end. When she left for K2 in June 1995, she had already consulted a solicitor.

She still felt torn: 'It eats away at me, wanting the children and wanting K2,' she wrote at base camp.

But when, after weeks of bad weather, her porters arrived to carry her equipment home on August 6, she suddenly decided to stay for one last try: 'Maybe they'd be happier if Mum was around but maybe summiting K2 would help make a better future for them,' her journal records. A week later, she did reach the summit, only to die on the way down.

On the top, the weather had been perfect. But in one of the freak weather systems common in the Karakoram mountain range, a hurricane was already blowing at base camp. Inexorably it crept up the mountain, its deadly vortex invisible from the slopes above.

It caught Alison and her companions when they were still above 27,000 feet. With the wind well over 100mph, they had no chance. Her body has never been found.

According to Doug Scott, 'one of the best tools for survival is one's intuition'. That, he says, means a mountaineer must listen to his or her inner voice - and be ready to turn back, or not climb at all, when that voice says No.

So is Tom planning to climb K2 simply because he feels ready - or are there dangerous external pressures affecting his decision, just as they once did his mother's?

Jim Ballard told us that he needs to raise about £100,000 to cover the cost of his son's expedition and equipment. Given that the family is once again virtually penniless, with him unemployed, Tom climbing full-time and Kate doing seasonal work as a ski instructor, Ballard is open about the fact that the only way to do this is by attracting extensive media coverage.

Terrill's film is an integral part of this strategy. It was Terrill who made a BBC documentary a few weeks after Alison's death, depicting Jim Ballard taking Tom and Kate to Pakistan for a glimpse of their mother's last mountain: it's not hard to see why he might have been attracted by a sequel.

Last night Terrill said: 'As a documentary film-maker, I am interested in Tom's progress and development as a climber. If Tom and Jim want to launch this attempt on K2, that is their responsibility from the get-go.

'As an old friend of the family, I would counsel them closely about any risks they might choose to take. But the decision to attempt K2 is Tom's and Tom's alone, in consultation with his close family.'

Despite this need for publicity to make Tom's climb possible, Jim Ballard was also adamant that the chance of sensational coverage had nothing to do with his son's choice of mountain. The only factor was the sheer challenge of the objective, not the fact Tom's mother had died on it. Jim Ballard said: 'The attraction is that K2 in winter is the coldest and most inhospitable mountain we know of.'

However, Tom, speaking last month, was perhaps more honest. 'I want to be a professional climber,' he said. 'It's obviously going to be easier to get sponsorship out of a trip to K2, given the history with our family.'

Either way, there will be no margin for error once Tom sets foot on the mountain: no one to help him if he falls into a crevasse, or begins to succumb to hypothermia. On the Eiger, by contrast, the efficient Swiss rescue service can be summoned by mobile phone.

Two months into the 2003 trip led by the Pole Wielicki, he and the Kazakh climber Denis Urubko were the only team members still able to climb. The rest were utterly exhausted and some had severe frostbite.

'Theoretically, it is still possible to attack the summit,' Wielicki wrote in his final dispatch. 'But if I decided to attack the summit with Denis, there would be no one at the foot of the mountain waiting for us. We wouldn't have any backup. It would show that our own ambition is more important to us than responsibility and prove our arrogance towards the mountain.'

His conclusion was stark: 'This is not a mountain for two people.'

Given his immense experience, that does not seem a point worth disputing. Yet according to Ballard, Terrill and Tom, K2 in winter is a mountain for just one.

Source: Daily Mail