Stephen Venables

Stephen Venables (* 1954 in London ) is a British mountaineer and writer . He currently heads the South Georgia Association and was previously President of the Alpine Club .

climber

Mount Everest from the east, Kangshung wall, routes
Upper normal route south from Nepal Western Qwm from south saddle
Normal route north from the East Rongpu Valley
 (12) northeast ridge
(7a) Stephen Venables et al. 1988
 (7b) American expedition 1983 (C.Buhler et al.)
 (7c) "Phantasy Ridge" (unclimbed)

In 1988, Venables was the first Briton to climb Mount Everest without bottled oxygen. His ascent happened on a new route (up to the South Col ) through the Kangshung Wall from the east of Tibet , which he undertook with only three other climbers, the Americans Robert Anderson and Ed Webster and the Canadian Paul Teare, without the support of Sherpas . All four reached South Col via the Kangshung Wall, but Teare decided to dismount because of suspected altitude sickness . The other three tried the summit ridge of the 1953 Hillary Route, but Anderson and Webster were forced to turn back at the south summit. In the meantime, Venables went to the summit and reached it around 3:40 pm late in the afternoon. Because he got down late, he decided to go to an outdoor swimming pool high up at 8,600 meters instead of exposing himself to the risk of falling in the dark. Anderson and Webster spent the night in an abandoned tent on a Japanese expedition. At dawn, Anderson and Webster went back up the mountain to find Venables, who was nearly frozen to death. The picture they took of the half-frozen, ice-covered and frightened Venables is considered an icon of the dangers on Everest. Anderson and Webster revived Venables and escorted him down to their own tents on South Col.

On the South Col they had considered, given their battered condition, possibly easier and better to descend west into the Valley of Silence , the Western Qwm, in Nepal, but failed to do so because they were not sure whether it would be up so late in the season Other climbers and their tents were available along the normal route - their radios were not working. The prospect of having to climb through the Khumbu Icefall without the help of a third party made them decide to go back down the Kangshung Wall to Tibet on their own, highly dangerous route. It took them another three days to come back down the wall in an incredibly difficult descent through avalanches, fog and cold. This included turning back to one of the wall camps hundreds of meters higher up before night, because an extremely crevasse-endangered area in the dark became too dangerous for them to continue their descent. The three climbers suffered severe frostbite; Webster suffered most from it.

Venables' other Himalaya - ascents opened new routes in Afghanistan (1977), Kishtwar Shivling (1983), Solu Tower (1987), the southwest ridge of Kusum Kanguru (1991) and the Panch Chuli V (1992). During the descent from Panch Chuli V, Venables broke his legs in a fall when a rappel anchor failed; thanks to his Indian and British teammates and thanks to the Indian Air Force , he was saved. This expedition was reported in his book A Slender Thread and in Victor Saunders' No Place to Fall . Venables also made initial climbs in Peru , Bolivia , Patagonia, and South Georgia . He appeared in several BBC documentary programs and in the IMAX film Shackleton's Antarctic Adventures .

Life

He was born the oldest of five siblings and grew up in Surrey . At the age of 17 he began to dream of mountaineering and made his dream a reality from the early 1970s. Venables became a father on June 6, 1991; his son Ollie was born. Ollie Venables was diagnosed with autism when he was two years old and leukemia when he was four. Ollie was the only known child in the UK to suffer from both autism and leukemia . After several years without cancer, Ollie developed a brain tumor from which he died on October 16, 2003 at the age of 12. His life was the subject of Venables' tenth book, Ollie , which was first published in 2006.

Stephen Venables now lives in Bath with his wife Rosie and son Edmond .

author

In 1986 he won the Boardman Tasker Prize for his first book Painted Mountains: Two Expeditions to Kashmir .

The 2007 Banff Mountain Book Festival's Best Mountaineering Book - Mountain Literature award went to Venables for his book Higher Than the Eagle Soars: A Path to Everest ”.

literature

• Painted Mountains: Two Expeditions to Kashmir , Mountaineers Press, 1987, ISBN 0898861365 .
• Everest, Kangshung Face , Pan, 1991, ISBN 0330315595 .
• Island at the Edge of the World: South Georgian Odyssey , Hodder and Stoughton, 1991, ISBN 0340556005 .
• Everest - Alone at the Summit , Odyssey, 1996, ISBN 0952937506 .
• with Fanshaw, Andy, Himalaya Alpine Style: The Most Challenging Routes on the Highest Peaks , Baton Wicks, 1999, ISBN 1898573395 .
• A Slender Thread: Escaping Disaster in the Himalaya , Arrow, 2001, ISBN 0099279061 .
• To the Top: The Story of Everest , Walker, 2004, ISBN 1844287254
• Ollie: The True Story of a Brief and Courageous Life , Hutchinson, 2006, ISBN 009947879X .
• Voices from the Mountains , Reader's Digest, 2006, ISBN 076210810X
• with Bonington, Chris , Meetings with Mountains: Remarkable Face-to-face Encounters with the World's Peaks , Cassell, 2006, ISBN 1844034496 .
• Higher Than the Eagle Soars: A Path to Everest , Random House, 2007, ISBN 0091795613 .
• Everest - The story of his exploration Frederking and Thaler, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-89405-465-4 . (GEO)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Authors . In: Alpine Club Yearbook - Berg 2005 . 2005, ISBN 3-937530-04-5 , ISSN  0179-1419 , pp. 320 .
2. ↑ Interview with SV, published on March 9, 2010, https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/an_interview_with_stephen_venables-2572
3. ↑ ^{a b} Ollie VENABLES: Memorial. Retrieved June 3, 2012 . 
4. ↑ Ollie, The Inspiring Story of a Special Child - About the Author. Google Books, accessed June 3, 2012 . 
5. ^ Winners of the Boardman Tasker Prize. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on February 25, 2009 ; accessed on June 4, 2012 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ↑ Awards ( Memento of the original from March 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at Banffcentre.ca