Dangerous Games: Ice Climbing, Storm Kayaking and Other Adventures from the Extreme Edge of Sports

The Seam In October of 1982, a twenty-seven-year-old British alpinist named Alex MacIntyre was killed by rock fall during a descent of the south face of Annapurna. Another British climber named John Porter was at base camp, watching the descent through his camera. MacIntyre and French alpinist Rene Ghilini were retreating after a failed attempt on the summit. "They were down climbing," Porter describes, "crossing a gully on a face that was the better part of ten thousand feet high. I lowered the camera to clean a speck of dust off the lens, and when I looked up again, Rene was alone on the face." MacIntyre had been struck and killed instantly by a single falling stone; his body tumbled to a ledge 500 feet below. Nearly seventeen years later, Porter drives through the darkness north of Glasgow, Scotland. It is the middle of March, and we're headed into the Scottish highlands for four days of ice and alpine climbing. Porter is preparing to write a biography of MacIntyre, and the events of 1982 have been much on his mind. Porter was one of the finest mountaineers of his generation; MacIntyre, eight years younger, had been his protege. Classmates at Leeds University, they were also good friends. Porter, MacIntyre, and other British climbers of the so-called "Leeds scene" led a renaissance of British alpinism beginning in the late 1970s. Before expeditions, MacIntyre's mother told Porter, "Take care of my boy." Eventually, Porter says, MacIntyre outstripped his tutor. In MacIntyre's obituary, Porter wrote, without envy but with a certain fraternal sadness, of the moment he realized that he had nothing more to offer; that his pupil had grown up and surpassed him. Around 1980, Reinhold Messner, arguably the greatest mountaineer of all time, lauded MacIntyre as the purest proponent of Himalayan superalpinism then at work. Messner was referring to a stylistic school of mountaineering that favors fast, light climbs by small teams or soloists--a style, born in the Alps, that Messner introduced to the Himalayas with spectacular results. Superalpinism is considerably more dangerous, and in part for that reason more aesthetic, than expedition-style mountaineering, which involves porters, Sherpas, fixed lines, high camps, and prolonged sieges of similar routes. Near the end of MacIntyre's life, enflamed by such praise and his own promise, the young climber made a number of extraordinary climbs. He also began, as Porter says, "to believe in his own legend. He began to break his own rules." Porter was ill and unable to climb on the fatal day. In the days before his death, MacIntyre had expressed a specific fear of rock fall, for which the huge south face of Annapurna is notorious. After the accident, a blizzard prevented Porter and Ghilini from recovering the body. "It was an awful decision to make," says Porter, "to leave your friend lying there in the snow, but it was the only thing to do; it was something Alex would have understood." Soon after, Porter says, "We raced back to Katmandu to face the world." "They didn't blame me, but I blamed myself," he continues. "I thought, 'How come I'm here? Did I crap out on him? Did I let him down? Was I a coward?' " Objectively, there was nothing more that Porter could have done. Since his first climb in the New Hampshire hills at thirteen, Porter, now fifty-two, has avoided the limelight in a career spanning five continents and nearly forty years. As part of a British expedition, he attempted Everest's west ridge in the winter of 1980. Among others, he helped establish major new routes on high-altitude peaks, including Bandaka, Chong Kun Dan, and Changabang. As planned, Porter and I meet two other climbers--Brian Hall and Tim Rhodes--at Mary Ferguson's Bed and Breakfast in the town of Aviemore, north of Scotland's Cairngorm Mountains. BoTodhunter, Andrew is the author of 'Dangerous Games: Ice Climbing, Storm Kayaking and Other Adventures from the Extreme Edge of Sports' with ISBN 9780385486439 and ISBN 038548643X.