The HEIGHT of TRAGEDY?
Escaping her troubled marriage, Britain’s most famous female climber was spurred to climb K2 — only to perish in the attempt. Now, 24 years on, her son is missing in the Himalayas . . .
SOME are bound to talk foolishly of a curse. Others will spread their hands helplessly and speak of the inevitability of a family obsession.
Yet the reality of the news that British climber Tom Ballard, 30, is missing on one of the world’s highest and most forbidding peaks — its grim nickname the ‘Killer Mountain’ — is the memory it triggers of an earlier tragedy, one which came against the background of a violent marriage.
In 1995, Ballard’s mother Alison Hargreaves, then at the height of her fame as the first woman to conquer Everest unaided, died as she descended from the summit of K2, the world’s second highest mountain. She and six other climbers were swept to their deaths by 260mph winds. Her body lies to this day in an inaccessible snowfield.
Of course, the disappearance of her son and his Italian- born climbing partner, Daniele Nardi, 42, may yet have a happier ending.
Officially the two men are still listed as missing — yesterday a Pakistani army helicopter rescue team was reported to have spotted the climbers’ tent at their last known camp, 6,000ft below the 26,660ft summit of Nanga Parbat. But bad weather and the escalation in tensions between Pakistan and India have hampered the search operation.
Sir Chris Bonington, Britain’s greatest living mountaineer, and a family friend, said last night that ‘one mustn’t write them off’. The lack of communication could be simply down to phone batteries failing in the extreme cold, he added. But the facts remain that the climbers have not made contact with their support team since Sunday and there are few more inhospitable and unpredictable places on earth than the Himalayas.
So do two potential tragedies in the space of almost 25 years constitute a curse, or merely the cruellest of misfortunes?
There is undoubtedly an invisible thread linking Alison’s own death to the disappearance of her son on the world’s ninth highest peak.
HE WAS just six when she died. She was 33 and while her death has naturally cast a shadow over his life, it has also fuelled his passion and love for mountains.
Four years ago, he became the first person to climb solo all six of the great north faces in the Alps in one winter season, among them the treacherous Eiger.
The achievement was one of the greatest feats in mountaineering history, demanding not just considerable skill and technique but also deep psychological strength.
In 2010, he announced plans to make a solo attempt on K2, the mountain where his mother’s body lies. That was postponed, but it was perhaps an indication of the haunting legacy of her death.
Throughout her climbing career criticism was often directed at Alison Hargreaves for selfishly putting her love for the mountains ahead of her responsibilities as a mother — Tom’s sister Kate was four at the time of Alison’s death.
In 1988, she had herself scaled the north face of the Eiger while six months pregnant with Tom. He would later defend his mother by declaring that her favourite saying was: ‘One day as a tiger is better than a thousand days as a sheep.’
But the impact of Hargreaves’s death on Tom and his sister became a matter of intense, and often unkind, fascination to millions after their father Jim Ballard took the pair to the glacier at the foot of K2 for a BBC documentary barely a month after her death.
Then a biography revealed a darker story, alleging that Alison had been driven to seek fame in part by money worries after her husband’s climbing equipment business and shop struggled in the early 1990s recession — but also to escape from an abusive marriage.
Alison was a 16-year-old schoolgirl when she met Ballard after taking a Saturday job in the climbing store he owned near her parents’ home in Belper, Derbyshire. He was married and almost twice her age, but they began an affair.
A few months later his marriage was over and in 1980, on her 18th birthday, Alison moved in with him. To begin with the relationship was loving, but Ballard later physically abused his 5ft 4in wife, the book claimed.
Climbing became a way of escaping from domestic violence. From 1983 onwards, her personal journals record a series of assaults.
In one entry that year she says: ‘I was frightened when I was kicked. JB (Jim Ballard) said I didn’t look after him when I was tired.’
In another she writes how he attacked her because he was late for a meeting and meant they could not dig the car out of a snowdrift. ‘JB beat me up again today... he blew up at me, thumped and kicked me in the snow.’
The violence continued after the arrival of their children.
In March 1989, she wrote: ‘Jim’s hit me on too many occasions now. I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve nowhere else to go — all my life has gone into building a house and home here.’
By the early 1990s, her husband’s business had failed; the phone was disconnected, her car repossessed and they could not afford to heat the house. Not long after, they lost their home to bailiffs.
Now climbing became more than just a sport. Alison was desperate to reach summits because she saw it as the only way to achieve financial independence and break free of her marriage. However, to make her name she needed to make her climbs as challenging as possible. So she chose the hardest routes to grab the headlines that would attract sponsors and the money she needed.
It is what took her to K2 in the summer of 1995. Still basking in the success of her conquest of Everest — achieved without sherpas or oxygen — she was determined to match the triumph.
Her marriage had apparently reached its end. According to her biographer David Rose, by the time she left for K2, she had already consulted a solicitor.
She was also said to have had a brief affair with a fellow mountaineer on an earlier climb, but it had petered out.
AFTER weeks of bad weather and false starts, porters arrived to take her equipment back down the mountain. She decided to stay for one last attempt at the 28,253ft summit — and made it.
But then freak weather, so common in the Himalayas, swept in — sucking her and her companions from the mountain.
Jim Ballard has never directly responded to his wife’s claims written in her journals. ‘They were her personal diaries, and they were not to be read by outsiders,’ has been his only comment.
After his wife’s death the family moved to Scotland until 2009 when they packed up the family home near Fort William, and drove an old VW camper van to the Alps.
At one stage, ahead of his north faces challenge in 2014, Tom and his father were living in a campsite in the Italian Dolomites. Kate, now a ski instructor, was said to be in South Africa recovering from a canyoning accident.
Before Tom embarked on his epic challenge, he gave a few hints about his mother’s enduring inspiration. She, too, climbed all six classic north faces in one recordbreaking season, in 1993, although she did it in summer, taking her young family with her on a camping holiday.
‘Unconsciously that is where this scheme must have been born,’ Tom said. ‘Some of her energy and passion for this project must have transferred to me.
‘It is very interesting following in the footsteps of my mother. Except that this time I am climbing, not playing in the sand.’
Perhaps most poignantly, he trusted his life to his mother’s old ice axes, ensuring that she was with him in spirit at the most dangerous moments of every climb. His gear was always stowed in the same barrels she used on her ill-fated K2 expedition.
Undoubtedly a brilliant Alpine climber, Tom’s current attempt on Nanga Parbat is his first on an 8,000 metre-plus peak.
‘It’s a new learning experience,’ he said ahead of the expedition. ‘I
have to learn a lot more about my body and how I react to altitude.
‘Himalayan winter alpinism is so much more remote, so much higher and colder [than the Alps]. It makes everything more difficult and dangerous.
‘The tasks involved in Himalayan climbing are the same, just harder.’
He and climbing partner Nardi — a veteran of four attempts on ‘Killer Mountain’ — arrived at their base camp in December and have been attempting the climb by the Mummery spur, the boldest and most direct route to the summit.
They have endured appalling conditions with winds so strong they could barely stand. At one stage Tom had to dig the Italian’s tent out of snow because he feared he was beginning to suffocate.
Even before the climb, they were weak from illness and lack of food.
Two Pakistani climbers dropped out of the expedition because of illness and injury. Given his experience, skill and the strength he has drawn from the death of his mother, if anyone can survive these nightmarish conditions and prevent a second tragedy striking the family, Tom Ballard can.
Posting on Facebook this week, sister Kate wrote: ‘Please join with me in positive thinking that my brother and Daniele will return safe. Please all believe and trust that they will be OK.’