A black Tuesday in the history of Himalayanism. This is how this date will be marked when the deaths of six climbers were known in two different accidents, one on Dhaulagiri where five Russian climbers perished, and another on Jannu East, which claimed the great North American mountaineer Mike Gardner. Autumn is much calmer and almost free of traffic in the 8,000 meter mountains, just what the Russian team led by Alexander Dusheiko was looking for, who found the Dhaulagiri base camp empty, finally the mountain to themselves, without sherpaoxygen bottles or clients queuing on the fixed ropes. A mountain without taming, without lowering and with 12 climbers willing to work together to climb it. After a first attack that placed two of its members on the summit, six more launched themselves up the mountain at the end of last week. Sick, the most experienced of the group, Valery Shamalo, had to retire. Dusheiko and four more friends (Oleg Kruglov, Vladimir Chistikov, Mikhail Nosenko and Dmitry Shpilevoy) continued. Now they are all dead, presumably victims of a fall at about 7,600 meters while their bodies have been spotted at about 7,100 meters from the air.
Also in the mountains of Nepal, but this time in the desired, but virgin, East Jannu, Mike Gardner (32 years old) found an unexpected end: only the largest are measured to the East of Jannu (7,460 m). The Navarrese Mikel Zabalza tried to reach its summit two years ago, without success: “It would have been the perfect excuse to hang up the crampons,” he smiled upon his return. Gardner’s partner, Sam Hennessey, is still not in a position to explain what caused his rope partner’s 700 meter fall: if he is still alive it is thanks to a happy coincidence: an elite French trio was trying to open a route in the same wall and took charge of rescuing him. The French were none other than the omnipresent Benjamin Védrines (The North Face Team), Léo Billon (military mountaineering team) and Nicolas Jean, that is to say the spearhead of modern mountaineering, revised, accelerated and increased.
Billon, suffering from altitude sickness, possibly saved the life of Hennessey on the rebound, one who was attempting the challenge for the third time. For Gardner, it was his second trip. Védrines explains why they gave up on reaching the top, on making history: “At 10:30 in the morning, everything changed. The serenity of the group was altered. Léo is no longer that super-efficient climber from the day before. He is not the elfin-looking mountaineer we know. Under my helpless gaze, I see him become a shadow of himself. He snorts loudly, moves very slowly and cannot take care of the basic tasks of the group. He strives to continue climbing, but I perceive that each pitch is an inhuman task. I try to convince myself that everything will be fine. Altitude is suffering. But at every meeting, I see his head resting against the ice seeking rest, a glimpse of normality. He is my friend, I know him and I know that his willpower tries the impossible. He wants the top. It extracts all its strength and all its weakness. But it is clear that Léo cannot continue. I’m just thinking about retiring. It hurts my soul to see my friend suffer like this: he has invested so many hours of training for this project that challenges our usual comfort in the mountains. But Himalayanism is as cruel as it is magnificent and any ambition can be swept away in a matter of seconds. We started rappelling. Hours later, we are at base camp, frustrated, friends, excited, tired, but alive.”
Védrines did not report the rescue of Sam Hennessey on his social networks, something he only made public when the family of Gardner, whose body was not found, was notified of his death. The two Americans broke the speed record on the Slovak Direct route to Denali in 2022 and last summer they opened a tremendous 2,000-meter line on Mount Hunter.
Gardner, like his father, was a high mountain guide and used to say that he didn’t remember if he learned to climb or walk before. Nor could he explain why he continued to go to the mountains after his father died climbing the Grand Teton alone in 2008. What others could say about him is that he was one of the greatest artists of fast, light and committed mountaineering. . However, he was not the typical monothematic mountaineer, solely focused on the mission of climbing. In fact, he used to say that climbing was not something that defined him as a person: life offered many ways to have fun, to search for oneself, to exist, to be. “Going on an expedition is a vital expression more than a fight to survive: there I find enormous happiness, but it is also true that I love to change, to do new things, whether physical or not,” he acknowledged in a profile published by one of his sponsors. .
He could spend hours on his skateboard or in winter practicing the curious local custom (it was born at the foot of the Tetons mountain range, Wyoming) of skiing on the flat at full speed holding on to a rope connected to a horse and rider. He liked to fly downhill in powder snow. He hated the typically virile ingredients of mountaineering: “getting up at ridiculously early hours, being cold, hungry…”, even though he did it constantly. His relaxed way of understanding mountaineering had placed him at the forefront of the new youth wave, without excessive egos and with a serene outlook on his activity: “it’s not about what you do, but how you do it.”
His desire not to pigeonhole himself, to not repeat himself, to be a person before a mountaineer, had led him to a simple reflection: what he truly loved was life, regardless of what he had chosen to do with it.
