Talking climbing mountains, love and consciousness with the first Australian to climb Mt Everest, Tim Macartney-Snape
Lamont: A collaboration with Mountain Journal, Issue 6 Winter 2022
Born in Tanzania where his parents were farmers, Tim always loved mountains. “We had a hill at the back of our farm. I just loved going to the top of it and looking out at the view. I was sent away, far to the north, to boarding school in a town situated on the slopes of the fifth highest mountain in Africa. I’d always loved the thought of getting to the top of it and looking at the view, unfortunately I didn’t get an opportunity back then.”
In his twelfth year his family moved to his father’s native Australia and settled on a small farm in North Eastern Victoria near Benalla. Tim got a scholarship to his father’s old school, Geelong Grammar, and at 15 spent a year at the Timbertop campus, just below Mt Buller. “We’d go bushwalking every weekend and in winter we learnt to ski, on wooden skis with screw on metal edges, kandahar bindings and leather boots. I got the love for skiing, in the last two years of school.
One of the teachers cottoned on to cross country skiing and would take us up the mountains on long weekends and holidays, ski touring on the Bogong High Plains. Before long we figured out you could ski down hills on those things, with a bit of practice.”
Going on to study Biological Sciences at ANU because of its proximity to the mountains, Tim joined the mountaineering club. “In the wintertime, I’d probably spend as much time skiing as I did studying, I also learnt rock climbing and mountaineering during the summer in NZ.” The uni club, organized a trip to the Himalaya but thinking it was too expensive and he was inexperienced, Tim didn’t sign up until he realised he was becoming more experienced than some of the others and with time some sponsorship rolled in reducing the cost. Tim ended up being the only one in the group to get to the summit of Mt Dunagiri in the Indian Himalayan. “After that I was offered a job as a trekking guide during the trekking season enabling me to climb at either end of the season. The next big climb I did was a mountain in the Everest region called Ama Dablam.” While on the elegant and more difficult North Ridge of the mountain, Tim would see Everest all the time and started wondering about it. At the time anyone who climbed the mountain did so as part of a big expedition with sherpa support and oxygen. It had just been climbed without oxygen by a couple of Tyrolian/Austrian climbers as members of a large group. “As you do, I started wondering what it’d be like up there. The only way I’d be interested in going to Everest would be to climb a new route in good style. Style matters in mountaineering. The purist mountaineer would go to a mountain with minimal equipment, start at the bottom and climb to the top; Alpine style. Whereas the traditional style of Himalayan climbing was to go on a big expedition, set up a base camp and then gradually work your way up the mountain with a chain of camps and supplies and lots of high-altitude porter (‘sherpa’) support.”
“Alpine style climbing is what’s traditionally done in the Alps. In the Himalaya, alpine style is a whole different thing. Not only are the mountains much, much bigger, but you’ve got altitude to cope with. It’s a different league, but still the ideal. Also to do a new route is the interesting thing - doing a first ascent. It’s going into unknown terrain, exploring. So I thought that’d be the only way I’d be interested to try Everest. Back in Kathmandu I bumped into a Japanese guy fresh from the north side of Everest, which had just been opened by the Chinese. For the first time since before the war, foreign mountaineers were being allowed into the north side of Everest. He’d come back from a successful Japanese expedition to the west side of the North Face and showed me some photos, he just kept saying ‘very direct’, which struck me. On the south side of the mountain, the Nepali side, it’s quite a complex approach into the mountain.”
“On the north side you can go up the glacier to the bottom of the North Face and it rises straight up to the summit. No ice wall or major ice cliff danger, just three vertical kilometres to the top from the bottom. I thought, he’s right, if you want to do an alpine style ascent of Everest, that’s the place to do it. Later that same year, China opened up and we managed to get permission to climb a mountain on the northeast edge of the Tibetan plateau. While we were in China I asked the Chinese authorities what the chances were of getting a permit for the North Face. They said a French expedition has just cancelled for the autumn of 1984. This was 1981 and back then only one expedition was allowed on any one section of the mountain, these days it’s open slather. I knew it was one of those fleeting moments of opportunity. Three years’ time? Probably we could get enough experience, worry about the money later. So they said, pay us $2,000 deposit. I told them to put it on hold while I convinced a few other climbing mates. We scraped together two grand and that was it, we were committed.”
The Chinese, however, were charging premium rates and quoted the team $150.000. “Traveling across China was exorbitantly expensive as if we were being put up in five star hotels, but actually they were just mud walled buildings with cement floors and cold water. The food was good, we had banquets all the way with officials cashing in at our expense. It was going to be a very expensive exercise but eventually we convinced Kerry Packer’s Channel Nine to sponsor us in return for the film rights. I’d worked out by then that the easiest way of getting money was to make a film. They sent a film crew along with us to record the climb from below and we filmed ourselves with super8 cameras. The film can be seen on YouTube “Everest: The Australian Challenge”.
“I’d worked out by then that the easiest way of getting money was to make a film”.
“The skiing on the central Rongbuk glacier was actually OK. We had skinny tele skis and I’d regularly ski the 3 km down from the foot of the face to our climbing base. The best experience, almost, was after coming down from the summit, my skis were waiting at the foot of the face. I took my crampons off, put them in my pack, clipped my skis on and telemarked down to camp as the moon came up and the snow was sparkling in the moonlight. Just amazing. Really smooth run down to camp and a most welcome a cup of tea.”
“I went back to Everest in 1990 and did a trip from sea level from the Bay of Bengal up through Kolkata then all the way through the foothills to Everest base camp, about 1200 kms, then climbed the mountain on my own without oxygen. I got a friend who was making a bit of gear on the side to make me some equipment bags. When I got back, I said we should start a business and ramp this up. We called it Sea to Summit, covering everything water and mountains. We started making small things, then cracked the international market with one product, a silk sleeping bag liner. The reason it was so successful was its packaging. It came in a stuff sack and had good colours, so we learnt the importance of packaging and presentation very early. We started expanding, got a good market presence by making things better with good materials, lightweight, compact with good design and our product range grew and grew. It eventually became a very successful business but I had a falling out with my partner about three years ago and divested my interest.”
In recent years Tim has been ski guiding in Hokkaido and bespoke trips to the mountains of Asia and Africa of exploratory trekking and mountaineering with World Expeditions. He has just returned from an expedition to the iconic Himalayan granite pillar, Changabang where his team made a successful ascent (in alpine style of course) of the much-coveted West Buttress.
Another interest and lifelong passion of Tim’s is for promoting the ideas of his friend, biologist Jeremy Griffith, who has delved deeply into the foreboding subject of human nature, or to be more precise, our Human Condition. “Barring natural phenomena that are outside human control, every single one of the problems that besets humanity can be attributed to our psychology”, says Tim. Jeremy points out that war, greed, selfishness, our insensitivity to nature - the rape and pillage of the natural world and our fellow humans are all the result of a psychosis that we all, to varying degrees, suffer from.
Having posed the question that lies at the base of every human conscience: ‘are we good or are we evil?’, Jeremy has, through first principle biology, come up with the astonishing answer that despite all the evidence to the contrary, we are, in the end, the most heroic and wonderful of species. This is a truth recognised by - but wasn’t able to be fully explained or properly understood by all the great religions; at base, the dictum that ‘God’ is ultimately loving. Until now it was also off-limits for most scientists. How we turned out to in fact be ‘nature’s crowning glory’ when current evidence suggests we’re on a fast track to take ourselves and a lot of other life into extinction and how we can personally transform ourselves to an angst-free, joyful state is comprehensively explained in Jeremy’s magnum opus ‘Freedom: The End of the Human Condition’, and in the best introduction to Jeremy’s work, his interview titled, ‘THE Interview’, which are both freely available to be downloaded online (www.humancondition.com) or purchased from Amazon. Tim is currently narrating an audible version of the book along with essays written by Jeremy on most aspects of these truly ground-breaking ideas.
“A major reason for climbing mountains was a quest for self-affirmation” admits Tim. “I suppose it was born of a deep-seated need to prove myself but knowing what I know now, I feel totally free from that motivation, it simply evaporated and I now go to the mountains just for the pure joy of being up high, revelling in the beauty. I take great pleasure in climbing up, to be up high looking out on the world.”
“Nature is a great leveller. There’s nothing like the feeling of aliveness when you’re active in the wild. When your body’s working well, it makes you appreciate everything, especially the simplest pleasures like having a drink. Something simple to eat, shelter. Those are the moments you remember. I can spend all day at a resort, have great skiing but I don’t really remember it. But if I go back country skiing, I certainly remember all the first track runs but not only them, also the times I struggled and got exhausted, got shiveringly cold. Put my tent up in a screaming blizzard, got inside, got cosy then revelled in getting warm with a steaming hot drink as the wind howled around outside.”
I’ll always come back to the Snowy Mountains, the Australian Alps. On a day it’s as good as anywhere. Of course there are the days when it’s terrible. Damp, breakable crust, white out, wind but there’s days in even the best, most celebrated skiing areas where it’s crap, the trick is to pick your conditions.