Dundee University’s Saturday Evening Lecture Series continues this evening with a talk by New York Times writer Graham Bowley. Jack McKeown caught up with him to find out why a disaster on the other side of the world became a personal quest for answers.
Unfortunately, the job was also playing havoc with his family life. Graham would spend the week in Brussels then return to the UK to spend the weekend with his wife Chrystia and their two daughters. A situation that was difficult to sustain became unsustainable when his wife, who is also a journalist, got a job in New York. Graham applied to work with the New York Times and a month later he joined his family in the Big Apple.
Although he now writes about business news, he began his career in New York on the paper’s foreign desk and this was where the idea for No Way Down was sown.
“When the story was just breaking I managed to speak to some of the climbers coming down. A picture began to emerge of what they had been through and I started getting an idea of who the people involved are.”
One of those who perished was 37-year-old Gerard McDonnell, who had become the first Irish person to summit K2.
“He had kept a blog about his progress. I read it and his character really shone through. He seems to have been quite a remarkable man, very charismatic.”
Graham flew to Ireland for McDonnell’s funeral and spoke to his friends and relatives.
“It was a hard thing to be at as a reporter, because it was a very private family thing. Everyone was really good though and spoke to me very fondly about Gerard.”
As he learned more, Graham became increasingly fascinated by the disaster.
“K2 is the second-highest mountain on Earth. It’s a much more technical climb than Everest and much more dangerous. If you go there there’s a real chance you won’t come back.”
Graham isn’t kidding. K2 is nicknamed Savage Mountain: for every four people who reach the summit, one dies trying.
“I wanted to find out what happened on the day those people died, but I also wanted to learn what drives people to do something so dangerous.”
By this time Graham had a book contract to write about the disaster and he began to research it in earnest “I set out to interview every survivor and the families of the people who died.”
He travelled to Italy, Spain, France, and the Netherlands. He spoke by telephone to survivors in Nepal and Serbia, and had researchers talk to climbers in South Korea. A thorough account of the disaster began to emerge, but one vital piece of the puzzle was still missing “There was no way I could write a credible book about the disaster without visiting K2.”
This was no small task. If K2 itself is a killer, the journey to it can be nearly as dangerous.
“I flew to Islamabad then had to cross the Swat Valley where fighting was still raging between the Taliban and the Pakistani Army. Then I had to get a jeep to the last village and then trek for six days. It would be dangerous, but my wife is a former war correspondent and she persuaded me I had to go.”
Base camp at K2 is 16,000 feet well below the ‘death zone’ of around 26,000 feet above which the human body starts to die but high enough for altitude sickness to be a potentially fatal problem.
“I went out with a photographer but he became ill from the altitude and had to be taken down the mountain while I went on. It was on a much smaller scale, but it gave me an idea of how climbers press on even when someone dies on the mountain. They have worked so hard and prepared so long that even a death cannot prevent them reaching their goal.”
No Way Down was released in the USA in July, where it raced to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, and the UK the following month. It’s just out in paperback.
Writing the book gave Graham an insight into what motivates the people who risk their lives by indulging themselves in this dangerous, expensive sport.
“At first I was sceptical about why they did it. Why would someone put themselves at such a high risk of death just for a thrill? But when I was walking to K2 base camp I spoke to a high-level climber and asked him why he did it. He just pointed at the mountains that surrounded us and said ‘this is why’. To him, those of us who spend every day at a nine-to-five job in an office were the incomprehensible ones.”Graham Bowley will be delivering the Saturday Evening Lecture at Dundee University on February 19. Free tickets are available on 01382 385564 or from www.dundee.ac.uk/tickets. The lecture starts at 6pm.K2 Photo by Flickr user mariachily. Graham Bowley photo by Marie-Helene Carleton/Four Corners Media.
At 5am on Friday, August 1, 2008, Graham Bowley turned up for work at the New York Times.
“I always got there when the rest of the world was still awake so I could talk to our foreign correspondents and check what had been going on,” he says.
One of the many balls he juggled on the paper’s foreign affairs desk that morning was an accident that had happened on the world’s second-tallest mountain.
“From very early in the morning reports were coming through that something terrible had happened on the top of K2,” he continues. “We wrote a few small stories but it wasn’t clear exactly what was happening. It wasn’t until a few days later that the scale of the thing became clear.
“A picture was emerging of at least nine or 10 people dead and my editor suggested I try to write something more substantial on it.”
By the time the final tally was counted, 11 mountaineers from several different international expeditions had perished high in the Karakoram Mountains on the border between Pakistan and China.
The expedition had been beset by bad luck from the beginning. Adverse weather meant some of the expeditions had been waiting as long as two months for their shot at the summit. When the weather finally gave them a chance, the mountain was much more crowded than usual.
Things started badly when a Serbian climber fell to his death 2000 feet from the summit and a Pakistani porter died trying to recover his body. Then the splinter of glacier came crashing down, sweeping four climbers away and leaving those above trapped and facing a desperate battle for survival.
“Because of human error they were late setting out for their final push for the summit,” Graham explains. “Normally, you would reach the summit around three, but the last of them didn’t reach the top until eight.
“They were exhausted, they were out of oxygen, food and drink, and had been for several hours. They planned to descend on fixed lines but when they got to the ridge they found an avalanche had severed the lines. They faced a choice of free-climbing down the ridge, deeply exhausted and in the dark, or bivouacking out overnight and probably freezing to death.”
Not everyone made it.
Among the heart-rending tales from that day are the wife who saw her husband swept away in front of her and the 61-year-old Frenchman who, having become one of the oldest men to summit K2, called his family to say he wouldn’t be coming home.
Graham’s book on the disaster, No Way Down, was a New York Times bestseller and the journalist will be in Dundee this weekend to read from it and answer questions. Born in Leicester in 1968, Graham (42) grew up on a dairy farm. He studied economics at Bristol University then worked for the Treasury.
“I got to work on parts of the budget and did lots of macroeconomic stuff,” he says. “It was during 1990 and ’91 when Thatcher stepped down and there was the leadership election. Major then Lamont were in the Treasury, and it was just before we came out of the ERM. It was a very interesting time to be there.”
He later returned to university, taking a Masters in economics at Oxford University, then landed a job on the Financial Times’ graduate trainee scheme. After spells as an economics reporter, leader writer and reporter on capital markets he eventually became a foreign correspondent and spent two years in Frankfurt.
“That was in the run-up to the Euro being introduced. Germany’s a fascinating country anyway, always examining itself.”
Graham moved on to the paper’s Saturday magazine staff, then joined the International Herald Tribune the global edition of the New York Times.
“I was based in Brussels and was the paper’s European Union correspondent. It was fascinating because I was telling America the story of the attempt to bring together a continent and the forces that were trying to tear it apart.”
Continued…
By this time Graham had a book contract to write about the disaster and he began to research it in earnest “I set out to interview every survivor and the families of the people who died.”
He travelled to Italy, Spain, France, and the Netherlands. He spoke by telephone to survivors in Nepal and Serbia, and had researchers talk to climbers in South Korea. A thorough account of the disaster began to emerge, but one vital piece of the puzzle was still missing “There was no way I could write a credible book about the disaster without visiting K2.”
This was no small task. If K2 itself is a killer, the journey to it can be nearly as dangerous.
“I flew to Islamabad then had to cross the Swat Valley where fighting was still raging between the Taliban and the Pakistani Army. Then I had to get a jeep to the last village and then trek for six days. It would be dangerous, but my wife is a former war correspondent and she persuaded me I had to go.”
Base camp at K2 is 16,000 feet well below the ‘death zone’ of around 26,000 feet above which the human body starts to die but high enough for altitude sickness to be a potentially fatal problem.
“I went out with a photographer but he became ill from the altitude and had to be taken down the mountain while I went on. It was on a much smaller scale, but it gave me an idea of how climbers press on even when someone dies on the mountain. They have worked so hard and prepared so long that even a death cannot prevent them reaching their goal.”
No Way Down was released in the USA in July, where it raced to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, and the UK the following month. It’s just out in paperback.
Writing the book gave Graham an insight into what motivates the people who risk their lives by indulging themselves in this dangerous, expensive sport.
“At first I was sceptical about why they did it. Why would someone put themselves at such a high risk of death just for a thrill? But when I was walking to K2 base camp I spoke to a high-level climber and asked him why he did it. He just pointed at the mountains that surrounded us and said ‘this is why’. To him, those of us who spend every day at a nine-to-five job in an office were the incomprehensible ones.”Graham Bowley will be delivering the Saturday Evening Lecture at Dundee University on February 19. Free tickets are available on 01382 385564 or from www.dundee.ac.uk/tickets. The lecture starts at 6pm.K2 Photo by Flickr user mariachily. Graham Bowley photo by Marie-Helene Carleton/Four Corners Media.
At 5am on Friday, August 1, 2008, Graham Bowley turned up for work at the New York Times.
“I always got there when the rest of the world was still awake so I could talk to our foreign correspondents and check what had been going on,” he says.
One of the many balls he juggled on the paper’s foreign affairs desk that morning was an accident that had happened on the world’s second-tallest mountain.
“From very early in the morning reports were coming through that something terrible had happened on the top of K2,” he continues. “We wrote a few small stories but it wasn’t clear exactly what was happening. It wasn’t until a few days later that the scale of the thing became clear.
“A picture was emerging of at least nine or 10 people dead and my editor suggested I try to write something more substantial on it.”
By the time the final tally was counted, 11 mountaineers from several different international expeditions had perished high in the Karakoram Mountains on the border between Pakistan and China.
The expedition had been beset by bad luck from the beginning. Adverse weather meant some of the expeditions had been waiting as long as two months for their shot at the summit. When the weather finally gave them a chance, the mountain was much more crowded than usual.
Things started badly when a Serbian climber fell to his death 2000 feet from the summit and a Pakistani porter died trying to recover his body. Then the splinter of glacier came crashing down, sweeping four climbers away and leaving those above trapped and facing a desperate battle for survival.
“Because of human error they were late setting out for their final push for the summit,” Graham explains. “Normally, you would reach the summit around three, but the last of them didn’t reach the top until eight.
“They were exhausted, they were out of oxygen, food and drink, and had been for several hours. They planned to descend on fixed lines but when they got to the ridge they found an avalanche had severed the lines. They faced a choice of free-climbing down the ridge, deeply exhausted and in the dark, or bivouacking out overnight and probably freezing to death.”
Not everyone made it.
Among the heart-rending tales from that day are the wife who saw her husband swept away in front of her and the 61-year-old Frenchman who, having become one of the oldest men to summit K2, called his family to say he wouldn’t be coming home.
Graham’s book on the disaster, No Way Down, was a New York Times bestseller and the journalist will be in Dundee this weekend to read from it and answer questions. Born in Leicester in 1968, Graham (42) grew up on a dairy farm. He studied economics at Bristol University then worked for the Treasury.
“I got to work on parts of the budget and did lots of macroeconomic stuff,” he says. “It was during 1990 and ’91 when Thatcher stepped down and there was the leadership election. Major then Lamont were in the Treasury, and it was just before we came out of the ERM. It was a very interesting time to be there.”
He later returned to university, taking a Masters in economics at Oxford University, then landed a job on the Financial Times’ graduate trainee scheme. After spells as an economics reporter, leader writer and reporter on capital markets he eventually became a foreign correspondent and spent two years in Frankfurt.
“That was in the run-up to the Euro being introduced. Germany’s a fascinating country anyway, always examining itself.”
Graham moved on to the paper’s Saturday magazine staff, then joined the International Herald Tribune the global edition of the New York Times.
“I was based in Brussels and was the paper’s European Union correspondent. It was fascinating because I was telling America the story of the attempt to bring together a continent and the forces that were trying to tear it apart.”
Continued…