Mountain of Storms, The American Expeditions to Dhaulagiri, 1969 and 1972

Publication Year: 1975.

Mountain of Storms, The American Expeditions to Dhaulagiri, 1969 and 1973, by Andrew Harvard and Todd Thompson. New York: Chelsea House, New York University Press, 210 pages. 52 pages of black and white illustrations and 14 color plates plus maps. Price $15.00.

Any expedition that climbs Dhaulagiri has a story to tell and Harvard and Thompson bring an invigorating freshness, a sort of Rover Boy brashness, to their tale. Most moving part of the book is Lou Reichardt’s account of the avalanche that ended the 1969 expedition. We are with eight climbers concentrating on bridging a crevasse when a wave of snow and ice blocks roar down. We crouch. The flood of powder pours over us, slows, stops, and the last ice chunks bound past. We call. Nobody answers. Nobody. Nobody is there! The suddenness shocks us violently as it did Lou Reichardt, the lone survivor, in 1969.

The authors move quickly to the 1973 expedition where their main problems are the split objectives of the party, their own unfamiliarity with the Himalayas and what they call “the ponderous mass of the expedition.” They frankly state that several months before reaching the mountain “a definite split existed in the group between those whose attention and commitment centered on the new route, the southeast ridge, and those who were primarily interested in reaching the summit.” This split complicates the expedition and flaws the unity and suspense of the book. The authors are mainly interested in climbing the southeast ridge, a route that could have been reconnoitered from the air and ruled out. When the crest of the ridge is reached after a 2,000-foot climb and the two miles of ridge beyond are shown to lack campsites the comment is made, “Without the ridge the expedition made no sense to many of us.”

The authors’ story is complicated by the mass of men and equipment. There are 16 American climbers and nine high-altitude porters, seven tons of food, gifts from 74 industrial donors and air lifts that include 60 boxes dropped at 19,300 feet in one day. It is no wonder that suspense lags in the latter part of the book. The authors give vivid details of life at Camp II and the effects of the wind there but we don’t share with Roskelley, Reichardt and Ngawang Samden their exhausting struggle towards the summit. The reaction to their triumph emphasizes again the split objectives of the party.

Drummond Rennie has an appendix on his examination of retinal hemorrhages and there are useful notes and glossaries. In one of these it would be better to say that Sherpas and Tibetans who live south of what is now the Nepal border rather than “highlanders of Mongoloid extraction.” Though the black and white photographs are not well printed, the text is readable and lively. Many climbers will identify with Harvard and Thompson, their attitude toward climbing and expeditions, and thoroughly enjoy Mountain of Storms.

Robert H. Bates