Victor Saunders is a pretty big name in mountaineering. Since taking up climbing in 1978, he has been on more than ninety expeditions, accumulating a total of seven years in tents or bivouacs. He’s summitted six of the ‘Seven Summits’ (the highest mountains of each continent) and has done six—SIX!—ascents of Everest. In 1996 he became a UIAGM (Union Internationale des Associations de Guides de Montagnes) mountain guide and last year he became president of the Alpine Club, the world’s first mountaineering club.
In addition to all that, he’s also a gifted author who writes amusingly and honestly about his exploits. His first book, Elusive Summits: Four expeditions in the Karakoram (1990), won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. His mountaineering memoirs combine the interest of travel writing (evocative descriptions of food, culture, landscapes, people), technical with the edge of thrillers–the threat of disaster is always just a step or two behind.
In the midst of preparing for yet another expedition, Victor has been kind enough to take some time to talk about his writing, particularly his brand-new memoir Structured Chaos: The Unusual Life of a Climber (2021), now available here at the Vertebrate Publishing website, and in many bookselling outlets in both physical and digital formats.
- One of the things that strikes me most about your books is how you portray yourself as the opposite of some kind of Boy’s Own hero. In fact, you repeatedly remind us that you’re near-sighted, asthmatic, relatively small, ultra cautious and prone to overwhelming fear when anticipating certain climbs—it’s the picture of a helpless quivering wreck rather than a he-man. A lot of your stories also show you suffering ignominious misfortunes while your companions laugh at you. Honesty makes for good comedy but I am also tempted to read it as having a more serious purpose, for example a corrective to climbing books that romanticize the climbing life, or a reminder that humility is not just a virtue, but a life-saving asset at extreme altitude.
I agree that (in my opinion) climbing literature has a tendency to a romanticism which I am slightly allergic to. I think you don’t need to talk about the seriousness of the climbing; it should be apparent what it is lurking beneath the surface. To add to that, my favourite companions are those that find failure amusing, and yet have the inner resource to try again… and again… without resorting to anger and frustration. These are people it is fun to be with.
“I woke frightened, but not sure why. It did seem to be an extremely hostile environment. A little wind, some clouds, and we had to be very careful not to get frostbite. It only took a minute. Perhaps the dreams sprang from this sub-conscious anxiety of getting it ever-so-slightly wrong.
I had breakfast of salami while the infernal Rafael was porridgeing and singing ‘Piddly-pai, piddly-pai’. This was Swedish for ‘tiddely-pom,’ as in : ‘And nobody/ KNOWS-tiddely-pom / How cold my / TOES-tiddely-pom…'”
2. You tell some stories about your childhood first in Malaysia and then in a rather grim boarding school in Scotland. How (if at all) do you think that your childhood experiences prepared you for or anticipated your climbing career?
I don’t really know the answer to that, I didn’t have another kind of childhood to compare with the one I experienced. I suppose the one thing that was persistent was the urge to explore the edges of our small world. To see what was just beyond the home garden. I think discovering the cherry orchard having climbed into the neighbouring walled garden gave me the same wide-eyed wonder that discovering new routes in hidden Himalayan valleys did decades later.
“Near the school was a walled garden. In north Scotland, walled gardens offer some sort of paradise. Surrounded by windswept moorland and bleak country of bracken and heather, the world behind these walls was a kind of Eden. And within the shelter of this walled garden was an orchard. The orchard had cherry trees. I had never seen cherries in Malaya. They must have looked to me like bushes sprinkled with red sweets. So I tried one.”
3. The term ‘structured chaos’ seems a good phrase to apply not only to climbing but also to writing, in that the memoirist must struggle to organize a welter of information into some sort of cohesion. What’s the relation between the acts of climbing and writing for you?
There is something creative about climbing. When you climb a new route you are making possible something that did not exist before. In so far as creativity is about leaving your mark for posterity, both climbing and writing have that in common. In 1914 George Mallory wrote about the Mountaineer as Artist before he went on to disappear on Everest ten years later. So it is not a new thing at all. For me the big difference is that physically, climbing, like so many of the best things in life, is a participant activity; while writing about climbs is essentially taking that personal experience and transforming it into something entirely dissimilar, a spectator sport.
“Mountains have given structure to my adult life. I suppose they have also given me purpose, though I still can’t guess what the purpose might be.”
4. You’ve participated in several rescue operations. Elusive Summits, for example, opens with a thrilling account of a rescue of two Japanese climbers on Latok IV, which interrupted your attempt on Uzum Brakk. In No Place to Fall there’s the nail-biting evacuation of Stephen Venables from Panch Chuli V (1992). And in Structured Chaos you describe the almost miraculous escape of Andy Parkin, whom you retrieved from a pretty precarious position by rappelling down a crevasse. Even though mortality is a fact of life, it sometimes seems to loom a bit closer in the mountains. How do you respond to people who say climbing is dangerous, that climbers have a death wish and this sort of thing?
That is a question I have often thought about. I am now quite old, and when I count my ten most constant rope companions over the decades, I find they are all still here. I don’t know if that means we are a particularly cautious group among climbers (a distinct possibility, we are mostly cowards) or that climbing is not as dangerous to longevity as the lack of it is. One could argue that choosing an urbane lifestyle, rich in calories and alcohol and lean in exercise is a more realizable (if less immediate) death wish.
“The windblast that had thrown Andy over our tent had deposited him on top of a crevasse. As Andy ripped through the bottom of his tent, still inside his sleeping bag, he was plunged down into the narrowing jaws of the slot beneath. Rattling down the crevasse headfirst, Andy had ricocheted between its walls, being battered in the process, until a snow bridge stopped him, about fifteen metres down. Just to be clear, that is the equivalent of falling off of a five-storey building. In the dark. Imprisoned inside a sleeping bag. Upside down.”
5. Friendship is a recurring theme in all your books, but especially in Structured Chaos. It’s clear that your climbing partnerships mean a lot to you and that behind the almost constant banter, there is a mutual respect and strong bond of trust. There’s one partnership in particular, between you and Mick Fowler, that has endured over the decades. In 2016 Fowler said, “We are very different personalities but the banter between us is good and we think the same way in the mountains. Climbing together again just felt like carrying on where we left things 29 years ago. At 66 years old, Victor has lost none of his ability, drive or determination. He is a truly remarkable man.” Would you agree with that characterization of your partnership, and of you?
On principle, I would never acquiesce to anything that Mick says about me. (said with a smile) but I trust his judgement on the mountains without hesitation. So the answer is (I am forced to admit) probably yes, in part. Of course, I do not agree with the comment about being remarkable; that is a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black.
“[I]t is not the mountains that remain with me but the friendships. In 1940 Colin Kirkus said: ‘going to the right place, at the right time, with the right people is all that really matters. What one does is purely incidental.”
6. One of my favourite things about adventure memoir is descriptions of food. Admittedly, most climbing food sounds unbelievably foul but it’s still fun to read about. And you include some memorable descriptions of meals at base camp, one involving wild rhubarb and blue sheep. What’s the most memorable meal you’ve had on a climbing trip?
Oddly, the meals that were the most delicious are those we talk about while starving on bivouac ledges. We would recite recipes and could almost taste the dishes we describe. Very satisfying.
“We had rotsal grytte (root veg stew) for supper. This was the first freeze-dried meal that I had remotely enjoyed. Ever. Rafael spilt his porridge on his sleeping bag. ‘Oh no! Disaster!’ he said, and sprinkled raisins on the spill before spooning breakfast off the bag and into his mouth.”
7. I hadn’t realized how similar a mountaineering expedition is to mounting a military campaign. There’s at least a year of planning involved and all kinds of things to consider: budget, equipment, sponsorship, transport, labor, wrangling with bureaucrats and so on. It seems that before you even make it to base camp there are a thousand obstacles to overcome. Is part of the appeal of mountaineering the mental challenge of making it happen in the first place? Is there any part of climbing that you don’t really enjoy?
You are right, there is a lot of planning, logistics and bureaucracy to get through and it is all part of the package. It is all challenging. But…you can make up for quite a bit of weakness in the planning with a strong performance, in the field. (For example, Soviet era climbers were so tough they made do with equipment and logistics that would sink many others). But no amount of excellent planning can overcome an inflexible or weak performance in the field. Another way to answer that question is to say we would all enjoy the climbing without the bureaucracy, but it is not likely that we would enjoy the paperwork with the mountain.
“In London, I was placed in the visa queue for two days only to discover the embassy could not process our passports because the IMF [Indian Mountaineering Foundation] in Delhi had not sent our application forms to the London embassy. It looked like our expedition was sunk before it started. There then followed some extraordinary string-pulling on the part of Divyesh and Vineeta Muni. They had a relative who was a brigadier, who knew a general, who called the London embassy and spoke to an admiral, who agreed to push the visa department to accelerate our permits. I hadn’t thought Andy and I would ever leave Europe, and yet two days later the whole British contingent was at the IMF briefing meeting in Delhi.” (Structured Chaos)
8. Are there mountaineering books that you’d recommend?
9. Despite your impressive list of summits, I’ve heard that you don’t climb to cross off a checklist but rather because you like climbing. Even if that’s true, do you have any plan to climb the Seventh Summit?
Although I have formed the view that climbing is more about the process than the goals, it is still nice to complete the odd list now and then. So, yes, if the chance came along, and if I was feeling up to it, and if the weather was benevolent, there is one more summit I would like to reach. But really it would not break my heart if that didn’t happen.
Books by Victor Saunders
Elusive Summits: Four expeditions in the Karakoram. Hodder & Stoughton, 1990.
No Place to Fall: Superalpinism in the High Himalaya. Hodder & Stoughton, 1994.
Alpes Occidentales: Trekking y Alpinismo with Hilary Sharp. Blume, 2002.
Trekking and Climbing in the Andes with Kate Harper and Val Pitkethly. New Holland Publishers, Ltd., 2002.
Himalaya: The Tribulations of Mic and Vic with Mick Fowler, ed. Lulu Publishing, 2017.
Structured Chaos: The Unusual Life of a Climber. Vertebrate Publishing, 2021. Buy HERE!
