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163 pages

English

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The untimely death of Dougal Haston in 1977 robbed climbing of one of its most charismatic, controversial and enigmatic figures. A man of extremes, who managed to combine a rock star's lifestyle with a career at the cutting edge of world mountaineering, Haston remains a cult figure whose deeds have inspired generations of climbers world-wide. Connor traces the career of a great climber from his native Scottish hills to his startling feats on Everest and the world's other great mountains.This definitive biography, which draws on never before seen diaries, explores the agonised development of Haston the man.

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	01 septembre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781786890269
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0640€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

DOUGAL HASTON: THE PHILOSOPHY OF RISK
JEFF CONNOR
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Jeff Connor, 2002 The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84195 340 3 eISBN 978 1 78689 026 9
Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh
www.canongate.tv
I still feel the urge to fight with the forces of unknown walls. It has almost become a necessary part of life for me.
– Dougal Haston, unpublished diary entry
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CALCULATED RISK
CURRIE BOY
REVELATIONS
IN LOW PLACES
VAGABOND KING
IN HIGHER PLACES
LOST HORIZONS
POSTSCRIPT
GLOSSARY
INDEX
List of Illustrations
Currie schoolboys James Moriarty and Duncan (later Dougal) Haston relax on Gunpowder Green, Glencoe in 1955
Dougal hits the big-time with his own slot in the Hornet comic
West Calder High School chums Haston, left, and Graham Pate
Jimmy Marshall below Buachaille Etive Mor Inset: Glencoe adventures with Jim Stenhouse, left, Graham Pate, centre, and Colin MacDonald with Buachaille Etive Beag in the background
Dougal gets ready for a day’s work at ISM in the apartment in the Rue du Commerce, Leysin
Dougal and Annie on a night out in the Vagabond. Inset, the Vagabond today
Annie and VW van in the Calanques
John Harlin strikes a pose in the Leysin snow Background: The retreat from the Eiger in March 1966 left to right: Jorg Lehne, Dougal, Gunther Stroebel
Dougal Haston tackles the Hinterstoisser Traverse on the North Face of the Eiger, August, 1963
Main picture: Dougal muscles up the Old Man of Hoy for the BBC cameras, 1967 Top inset: The cast of the Hoy TV epic: front row , left to right: Pete Crew, Ian McNaught-Davis, Joe Brown; middle , Peter Biven, Barry Biven, Chris Bonington, Tom Patey, Dougal, Ian Clough, unknown, the Rev Wilkinson, Hamish Maclnnes, Peter Gillman Bottom inset: Mick Burke and Dougal after the winter ascent of the north face of the Matterhorn, 1967 All pictures; courtesy of John Cleare
Dougal at the high point on the south-west face of Everest November 14, 1972
Nick Estcourt, Dougal and Dave Bathgate take a break during the Everest walk-in, 1972
Don Whillans breathes cigar smoke, Dougal makes do with oxygen at Camp 4, Everest, 1971
Dougal coils rope on the Eiger West Flank and shows Clint Eastwood the ropes during the 1974 filming of The Eiger Sanction
Dougal prepares to move away from the third bivouac site, Mount McKinley, 1976. His last major climb.
Dougal felt uneasy with the official side of fame: here with a presentation at the Royal Geographic Society and piped into Edinburgh’s Usher Hall with Chris Bonington and Annie
Dougal shows the enervating effects of altitude at Heathrow Airport on arriving back from Everest in the autumn of 1975; Doug Scott is hardly touched.
All quiet in the Western Cwm … Dougal nears the top of Everest’s Khumbu Icefall, 1975
Main picture: Ariane Giobellina ski-touring near La Riondaz above the village. The slope that avalanched and buried Dougal is behind and above her left shoulder Inset: Eley Moriarty and Doug Scott carry Dougal’s coffin through the Leysin snows. Ariane is on the right in the dark glasses
Dougal Haston
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the co-operation of Ariane Giobellina, Annie Haston, Guy Neithardt, Allan Rankin, Blyth Wright, Alec Haston, Russell Sharp, Dave Bathgate, Sir Chris Bonington, Doug Scott, Paul Braithwaite, Robin Campbell, Jimmy Marshall, James ‘Eley’ Moriarty, James Stenhouse, Graham Pate, John Cleare, Davie Todd, Beth Bevan, Sigi Hupfauer, Deutsche Alpen Ferien, Mike Thompson, John Fowler and the Scottish Mountaineering Club, Royal Robbins, Tom Frost, Jim Brumfitt, John McLean, Rusty Baillie, Maude Tiso, Peter Gillman, Ken Wilson, Bev Clark, Andy Wightman, Davie Agnew, Joy Kor, Chic Scott, Ian Nicholson, Allen Fyffe, Jim Cruickshank, Norman Dhyrenfurth, Clint Eastwood and Malpaso Productions, Larry Ware, Pat Littlejohn and the International School of Mountaineering, Eddy O’Hare of Currie Youth Club, West Calder High School, the Burgh of Currie, Midlothian, Jim Gilchrist of The Scotsman , John Gibson of the Edinburgh Evening News and the National Archives of Scotland.
The Dougal Haston articles originally published in the Edinburgh University Mountaineering Club Journal and the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal are reproduced by kind permission of these two bodies, and the extract from Calculated Risk appears courtesy of Ken Wilson, Diadem Books and Annie Haston. The extracts from In High Places are also used with the permission of Annie.
As so often, Tracey Lawson was a fund of sound advice, and the finished manuscript owes much to the linguistic abilities of Tina Laukkonen and Stephanie Roetger. Duggie Middleton was a superb editor, offering his usual sage suggestions, and Frances Rendall performed wonders at short notice with some of the transcripts. Finally, a word of thanks to Jamie Byng, Mark Stanton and the staff of Canongate Books for their continued support and enthusiasm.
CALCULATED RISK
‘My time has not yet come either; some are born posthumously’ – Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
T here are many, those who knew the time, the place and the man, who believe that the day of Dougal Haston’s death was the most perfect day of his life. It was a departure replete with irony, and yet of almost mythical appropriateness. Sad and sorrowing but fulfilling and satisfying, in many ways the death mirrored the life.
Three days of Alpine storm in Leysin had finally retreated and given way to a high front that embraced most of central Europe. The sun glared out of a cloudless Swiss sky so blue as to be almost black. The clear, cold air, as it does on perfect mountain days, seemed to throb with a pulse that could belong only to nature, and there was renewed beauty even in Leysin’s traditional travel-brochure view across the Rhone Valley to the Dents du Midi and beyond. Above, there was the tingling expectation of untouched fresh powder snow more than 60 centimetres deep.
The outlook was fine elsewhere. The day before, Sunday, he had completed the last of the 190 laboriously handwritten pages that made up his first novel. It would eventually be called Calculated Risk , although at the time he had not given thought to a title. All that remained was a final check and some minor rewriting, once Ariane had typed it into a workable proof from his scrawl, and then he could start to look for a publisher. It had taken almost a year of unfamiliar effort, but his ordered psyche had seen him through. In the end, it had been simply another challenge to be met, another discipline digested and mastered. Already, the seeds of a second novel were planted in his mind, a story in which the life of the hero would start at his death. Ariane had liked that one. She even argued that the book should go backwards; instead of growing old, the process would be reversed into growing young and dying at birth. The idea had appealed to the mystic in both.
The future held a rich promise: total, happy immersement in a relationship that amazingly seemed to climb to a different plane daily, and plans, great plans for great mountains. As contentedly optimistic people often do, a few months previously he had sketched out, in one of the school exercise books which he used to jot down his random thoughts and ideas, a hypothetical calendar of the 12 months ahead. It was a year that would include the indolent pleasures of Goa and Corsica and the Med with Ariane, mixed with the necessity of work as director at the International School of Mountaineering in the summer, and the Calvinistic delights of new climbs in Alpine winters. There was a trip to the Karakoram and K2, the second-highest mountain in the world. He had already climbed the highest. There were also hints of a return to Nepal with Chris Bonington, and advanced plans to start an offshoot of his Leysin climbing school in Canada, based mainly in British Columbia. The demons that had pursued him for most of his life, too, seemed to have receded. Many had remarked on the change over the past 12 months; the anger and contempt were gone, and even the drinking had moderated. If this was happiness, he appeared to have found it.
It would be untrue to say, as some did, that he had ignored the avalanche warnings that had closed the main téléphérique to La Berneuse; rather he had digested the message and, as he had done all his life, weighed the odds for and against. He judged them slightly in his favour, and that was enough to send him striding up into the powder fields.
Until that afternoon, the gods who overlooked mountains and mountaineers had always smiled on him. Above the Central Pillar on the Eiger, the fraying rope had broken with the next man on it, a few minutes after he had kicked and swung and sawed his way up the fragile line. Two years after Everest, and he still held the world record for the highest night out in the open without oxygen. He hadn’t even got frostnip from that one. On Mount McKinley, they had been so sure of themselves that, on the second day, they had given the mountain a sporting chance by discarding half their bivouac gear and much of the food. And still he came through four days later.
Remember, as a gangling, bumbling 16-year-old on a misty Ben, when he and Jim Stenhouse had walked out over the North-East Buttress instead of heading for the Cam Mor Dearg Arête? Another few feet north and there would have been no Annapurna, no Eiger and no Everest. And, of course, no Leysin and no Vagabond and no Annie and Ariane, and no days like this when he owned every mountain in sight.
And those little crosses dotting his memory: Smith in the Pamirs,