“As night fell we reached a point 100 meters from the summit. We continued advancing through a snow corridor at a temperature of 38 degrees below zero and finally, at nine o’clock, we crested Annapurna East.” This is an excerpt from the story of the first ascent of a Spanish expedition to an eight-thousander taken from the archives of the Himalayan Database (HD), the monumental database promoted from Kathmandu by the late Elisabeth Hawley, the legendary journalist known as the notary of Everest . Josep Manuel Anglada and Jordi Pons, both 91 years old, along with Emili Civis, 81, remember what those weeks were like in the spring of 1974 that culminated on April 29, 50 years ago tomorrow, with the ascent of Annapurna East (8,026 m.).
The members of the historic expedition who are still alive maintain regular meetings. On the occasion of this anniversary, the three climbers who reached the top, the aforementioned Anglada, Pons and Civis, and Xavi Pérez, who was part of the support team, met a few days ago in Barcelona to remember their adventure, the ascent to the summit that appears near the main Annapurna (8,091 m.), the first eight-thousander trodden by human beings, the French Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal, in 1950.
As Pons, who enjoys an intense activity and continues climbing, highlights, that spring there was a Basque expedition that also sought to be the first in the state to summit an eight-thousander, in his case Everest, but it ended up less than 320 meters from its goal. aim.
At that time, the Nepalese authorities granted permits in dribs and drabs; overcrowding came decades later with the emergence of commercial expeditions. They were alone while this season, until the 24th, 25 authorizations had already been issued to climb Annapurna I and 388 on Everest.
“The cargo, five to six tons of mountain equipment, fuel and food, arrived at the port of Bombay and from there by land to Kathmandu. The approach march on foot to the base camp began in Pokhara, the second city in the country, and took us a little more than two weeks,” the climbers recall in a meeting at Anglada’s house. While they chat, they review photo albums, official documents and the bags in which the mail runner rushed the correspondence to Pokhara. Anglada keeps as a souvenir those that have the name and address of Miss Hawley stamped on them, to whom they reported her progress and who in Kathmandu questioned them about the details of their ascent to verify the summit. They arrived at the top at night and the snapshot at the highest altitude that they treasure is the one that Pons took in Civis at 7,900 meters.
The initial plan included climbing Annapurna I, that of the pioneers Herzog and Lachenal, but on April 4, when they reached the base camp, at 4,500 meters, they already saw that the route was too dangerous, “constantly swept by avalanches”, before so they opted for option B, the eastern summit, which no one had climbed before.
The obstacles began early, in Pokhara, due to the difficulty of recruiting porters. “They worked in the fields and if it suited them they joined expeditions. After searching a lot, we found 170 men, very poorly equipped and worse footwear, as well as 50 mules to transport everything,” they add. The problems with the Sherpas were a constant. The altitude and the avalanches inspired them with respect and they refused to carry loads beyond Camp 3. Without the support of the Sherpas, they decided that only one group would attempt the summit, the one made up of Anglada, Civis and Pons. Xavi Pérez, Antoni Villena and Manel Martín acted as a support group.
At dawn on the 29th they woke up in camp 5 mounted on a sort of small landing at 7,490 meters. The three of them shared a tent and shortly before four o’clock Pons stuck his head outside, saw a spectacular starry sky and began to melt snow to prepare coffee and oatmeal. At such an altitude you survive at an extremely slow pace, everything costs a thousand times more. Around 7 they started to rise. Pons points out that they only gained 40 meters of elevation every hour. In the middle of the afternoon, fatigue took its toll and hallucinations appeared. Pons saw a Mormon camp, Civis thought he was in Yosemite and a fourth person always accompanied them, among other delusions typical of altitude.
“At nine o’clock we reached the summit with a full moon and negative 38 degrees. We sat on the narrow ridge and quickly began the descent,” says Pons. The three say that they don’t remember many details, that a lot of time has passed.
Later investigations lowered the altitude of this peak to between 7,937 and 7,986 meters, although the HD shows 8,026 meters.
After the Catalan expedition without artificial oxygen, only 13 people summited Annapurna East, among them Erhard Loretan, Jerzy Kukuczka, Alexei Bolotov and Elisabeth Revol, according to the HD. The French mountaineer is the only woman to have ascended this mountain, in 2009, along with the Czech Martin Minarik, who died on the descent.