Driven to follow in his mother’s fatal footsteps
After Alison Hargreaves’ death 20 years ago, her son Tom vowed to climb her last mountain
‘We both like to be alone in the mountains’ ‘I find snow and ice easier to deal with than people’
THERE will have come a point after she reached the top of K2 when Alison Hargreaves knew she was going to die. Standing on the forbidding summit of the world’s second highest mountain in the gilded pallor of the setting sun, Hargreaves could see the heavy blue-grey altostratus clouds of a nascent storm building far below on the Chinese side.
Yet, conditions at 28,000ft were perfectly calm and the brewing trouble far below must have seemed sufficiently far off not to pose a threat. At that moment, her mind might have drifted to the remarkable achievements that were set to mark her as one of Britain’s great climbers.
It was the summer of 1995 and she was dazzling the climbing world. Three months earlier, she had become internationally famous after she made the first unsupported ascent of Everest by a woman without oxygen, and now she had conquered the frightening K2.
Only that tricky descent stood between her and a triumphant reunion with her beloved children, Tom, six, and Kate, four. But she never made it home. As she headed down the notoriously treacherous south face, that growing storm she had spotted far below enveloped her with savage brutality.
Violent winds that struck the base of the mountain were forced upwards with increasing ferocity, sweeping everything – and everyone – before them. As terrifying hurricane-force gusts screamed past them, Hargreaves and five other climbers clung desperately to the ice-capped rocks but were simply torn from the mountainside and tossed like rag dolls into oblivion. As her frozen senses shut down in the howling darkness, Hargreaves must have realised she had passed the point of no return.
The following day, after the storm subsided, two Spanish climbers found one of Hargreaves’ boots and her blood-stained anorak and harness on K2’s huge south face. They believe they located her body at 23,000ft and tried to reach her but were thwarted by the conditions. Alison Hargreaves remains where she fell, in a snowy crevasse on the ‘Savage Mountain’.
Her death at the age of 33 on August 13, 1995, remains one of modern climbing’s most contentious stories. Hailed a hero after Everest, Hargreaves suffered a posthumous backlash for supposedly putting her love for the mountains before her responsibilities as a mother.
Back home in Fort William, in the shadow of Ben Nevis and in the eye of a growing media storm, it was left to her husband and fellow climber, Jim Ballard, to fend off the press and explain to the couple’s two young children that Mummy was never coming back.
It was, Ballard later recalled, ‘the hardest thing that any parent will have to do’. There can be few things more upsetting and confusing for a six-year-old child to grasp than their mother’s untimely death.
But having digested the news, Tom is said to have looked up at his father and announced: ‘I want to see my mum’s last mountain.’
His words could easily be dismissed as a heartbroken boy struggling to express the grief of losing a parent.
Certainly, they carry a child’s insensitivity to the practicalities of trekking to the jagged Karakoram range, in order to glimpse a peak so remote that when it was first measured in the 19th century no local name for it could be found and it has kept its bureaucratic Survey of India tag.
Nevertheless, young Tom did travel with his father and sister to base camp in Pakistan with a BBC documentary team to pay their last respects, although the trip was dismissed as a stunt in some quarters and Jim Ballard faced accusations he was trading on his wife’s death for financial gain.
Given all of that and all the grief visited upon him as a youngster by mountaineering, one might have expected young Tom to steer well clear of a career in climbing. But the Ballards, it would seem, are wired differently to the rest of us. Either that, or their fates were frozen forever at the time of Hargreaves’ own death.
Not only is Tom Ballard now a rising star among the climbing fraternity at the age of 26, but the same obsession with danger which killed his mother appears to have utterly consumed him as well.
Last winter, he pulled off one of the most daring feats of Alpine climbing by becoming the first solo climber to ascend all six classic ‘North Faces of the Alps’, including the iconic Matterhorn and Eiger, in a single winter season.
It was a project many veteran Alpinists thought impossible, but Ballard was spurred on by his mother’s record as the first lone climber to complete the same set in the more forgiving summer season.
Furthermore, his ultimate goal remains to follow in Hargreaves’ illfated footsteps to the top of the very mountain which claimed her life. But why go precisely where she only found death? ‘I think K2 is a very important part of my personal story, and my climbing,’ was all he could offer, in a rare interview this week.
His fixation with pursuing his famous mother up dangerous mountains seems absolute. It is ‘in the blood’, he says. He doesn’t work, he only climbs. He has no proper home, but instead endures a strange, nomadic lifestyle travelling the Alps in a beaten-up white campervan in search of new routes to conquer.
His lone companion on this singular journey is his pensioner father who, at the age of 69, drives the van and supports his son’s climbing ambitions in much the same way as he once managed Tom’s mother’s burgeoning career.
Since they packed up and left their home in Scotland six years ago, the pair rub along largely on Jim’s pension and a little sponsorship money, subsisting on simple meals of pasta and vegetables prepared by Jim on a camp stove. For the past year, they have been based at a campsite at Val di Fassa, high up in the Italian Dolomites.
It is an unlikely set-up to say the least – a young man choosing to live cheek by jowl with his ageing father in some discomfort while daily dicing with death – and its curious workings were recently exposed under the unflinching gaze of a camera lens.
An Italian film crew captured Tom’s winter quest and the resulting documentary, TOM, has just been awarded best mountaineering film at the highly-regarded 2015 Kendal Mountain Festival. It reveals many moments of quiet tension between the pair and little familial tenderness. Tom confesses that they row often, although briefly, and he is grateful for his father’s advice. It sounds a little like an old married couple, but it would be facile to suggest Tom now fills the gap in his father’s life left by Hargreaves’ death.
The film largely steers clear of Hargreaves’ story and much as he would prefer not to discuss her, in seeking to promote the film, Tom is resigned to the subject of his famous mother cropping up.
He admits he feels closer to his mother in the mountains as she ‘guides my path’, and prides himself on their special connection – she climbed the Eiger while five months’ pregnant with him, while he still uses some of her old equipment, including her old ice axes.
But, though he stressed climbing was always a choice he made by himself, he added: ‘I don’t think it’s much of a surprise what I do now.’
His memories of his mother may be hazy, but he describes a kindred spirit: ‘We both didn’t really say very much and liked to be alone in the mountains and experience it by ourselves.
‘I have always been quite solitary. I am very comfortable being in my own company. I find snow and ice easier to deal with than people. I know my limits and capabilities. I know when to push, and when to back off.’
He added: ‘Solo-ing really is an incredibly selfish thing to do, the way it involves and yet isolates the people closest to you, friends and family.’
Might it also, conveniently, help to shut down the acute pain felt at the loss of a loved one? While not addressing the question directly, Tom said: ‘I don’t think of her at all whilst climbing. Whilst climbing all I am thinking about is the next move.’
And what of his intense relationship with his father, a prickly, self-styled ‘professional Yorkshireman’? That seems almost as hard to unravel as the reasons which bound his parents together in the first place.
Jim Ballard was already middleaged and married when he met Tom’s
mother, then a 16-year-old Saturday girl at his outdoor shop near her parents’ home in the Derbyshire town of Belper.
But the pair quickly developed a relationship and on Alison’s 18th birthday in 1980, she announced to her shocked parents that she was moving into his cottage. The marriage produced two children on whom they doted.
But relations were often strained and a darker side to the story emerged when a 2010 biography of Hargreaves, which gained access to her unpublished journals, suggested that she suffered from a controlling husband who saw himself as her ‘manager’.
Partly, it is said, she climbed to provide for her family as her husband’s mountaineering shop fell victim to recession in the Nineties, but also to seek refuge in the mountains from an unhappy home life.
Her biographers claimed she had stayed with Jim Ballard because she needed security, but now the fame and respect which would follow her exploits on Everest and K2 could provide that. She would come down from the summit a changed woman and begin a new life without her husband.
Ballard has previously acknowledged that the marriage was in trouble at the time of the attempt on K2, but has always refused to entertain the more serious allegations about what went on behind closed doors, saying: ‘They were her personal diaries, and they were not to be read by outsiders.’
Whatever the truth of the matter, Ballard and his two children remain extremely close. Kate, a ski instructor, was recuperating with friends in South Africa following a canyoning accident but is presently travelling in the States.
Which leaves Tom and Jim. It is arguably clearer what Tom gets out of their unconventional living arrangements than his father. Jim’s sacrifices allow his son to pursue his sport with almost monk-like devotion. Tom’s Italian girlfriend, Stefania Pederiva, also provides an anchor to her native Dolomites.
For Jim Ballard, there is only the backbreaking trudge of campsite life mixed with the vicarious pleasure of seeing his son develop into a fine climber to rival his late wife.
But even that quiet satisfaction must be tempered by the realisation that Tom will seek ever greater challenges and ever greater danger, just like his mother. His next project is a stepping stone to his ultimate goal of reaching K2. In the spring, he will embark on his first major climbing expedition outside Europe when he joins a team attempting Gasherbrum IV in Pakistan, the 17th highest peak in the world and, by repute, the hardest.
It is a step up, the sort of place where one false turn can spell disaster. It is also so far removed from civilisation that any victims will likely remain forever where they fall.
And if there is one other thing he and his father agree on, it is a desire not to see her remains brought down from the mountain, preferring her body to lie undisturbed in its icy tomb. ‘It is where she was evidently most comfortable, so we would just prefer that she stays there,’ he said.
Tom has never blamed Hargreaves for leaving him motherless that day in August, 1995. On the contrary, he says: ‘I would have been disappointed with her if she hadn’t gone out to live her dreams!’
But he also knows that he must play on that painful family legacy to achieve his own place in climbing history.
As a climber, he ‘gets’ her need to choose the hardest routes in order to meet her own challenges and to grab the headlines that would bring in sponsorship money to feed the family, and fame to feed her ambition.
He now faces a similar dilemma, knowing that to attract sufficient interest from sponsors, he must spice up the risk. His plan – to become the first person to scale K2 unsupported and in winter – has been described by some commentators as ‘certain death’.
Just 775ft shorter than Everest, it is considered harder to climb while the descent boasts one of the highest mortality rates, with one summiteer in ten perishing. For all her climbing ability, his mother failed to beat the mountain’s terrible odds.
To such naysayers, he would doubtless cast up his mother’s favourite expression: ‘Better one day as a tiger than a thousand days as a sheep.’
He added: ‘You are always pushing yourself to a point of no return, to see how far to the edge you can get without falling off.’
It is an alarming prospect, given the terrible hold that this savage mountain still appears to have over this family. One hopes that, 20 years on, Tom Ballard can see the danger clearly enough.
’You are always pushing yourself to the edge’