They Could Be Retired. Instead, They’re Chasing Unclimbed Peaks in the Karakorum.
There are bold alpinists, and there are old alpinists. And then there are Mick Fowler and Victor Saunders.
Earlier this month, the pair—who have been friends for nearly 50 years—topped out the Karakoram’s 6,258-meter Yawash Sar, notching an impressive first ascent of the remote Pakistani peak. But while that alone is remarkable, it’s their stats that really earn the double-take: At the time of the climb, Fowler was 68 years old. Saunders was 74. In a world where daring alpinists rarely seem to live past middle age, these two seemed to have cracked the code.
The first secret? Knowing what you’re doing. Saunders and Fowler are both decorated alpinists. Fowler is a three-time Piolet d’Or winner. Saunders is an IFMGA-certified mountain guide and has six Everest summits—among many others—to his name. Both men have authored notable first ascents on 6,000- and 7,000-meter peaks throughout the Greater Ranges—including the first ascents of the Golden Pillar on 7,027-meter Spantik in the Karakoram, which they did together in 1987, and of the 1,000-meter North Spur (ED) on Sersank Peak (6,050m), in the Indian Himalaya, in 2016.
But the partnership didn’t always feel so divinely inspired. In fact, when the pair first met in 1976, they were sure they’d never climb together. At the time, Fowler had developed a bit of a reputation as a choss hound, establishing FAs on sea stacks, chalk cliffs, and other crumbling chunks of stone around the U.K.
“He was known for having a predilection for loose rock,” Saunders recalled. “Everyone said, ‘Don’t climb with him, this person is not normal.’” But one evening, Saunders was sitting around a pub, drinking beer, when Fowler called him up.
“Mick had run out of climbing partners for the week. It was a Wednesday, and he was going on a Saturday,” Saunders said. “I had been warned not to climb with him, but by then I’d had too much beer and I said ‘Oh, alright.’” The two spent several days climbing in Scotland, and Saunders discovered his assumptions had been wrong.
“I felt happier with Mick on serious, difficult ground than I did with lots of people on easier ground,” Saunders said. The two found they had a similar approach to climbing, similar risk tolerances, and similar visions for what made a good line.
That year, they nabbed the first ascent of Ben Nevis’s The Shield Direct (VII, 7)—Scotland’s first route above grade V. The trip launched a 45-year partnership that’s yielded more than a few cutting-edge, alpine-style lines. And yet, they both call Yawash Sar one of their finest routes to date.
“It’s shapely and steep, with good climbing,” Fowler said. Which all came as a bit of a pleasant surprise.
“We were quite depressed, initially, because we had a period of bad weather for the 10 days or so we were in base camp,” Saunders said. “The forecast just looked horrendous. At one point, Mick said he didn’t think we had more than a 10-percent chance of getting up it.”
But then the weather cleared. And once they crossed the bergschrund and got a good look at the route, the stoke started to set in.
“Victor is a complete beast when it comes to walking and wading through snow,” Fowler says. “But above the bergschrund, that’s what we like most: Doing about 50 meters of lung-busting activity at a time, then sit down, belay, enjoy the view, snap a few photos, and hurl abuse at your mate. That’s when the fun begins.”
But while fun, it wasn’t all easy. Route finding was the first real challenge.
“It was a complex face,” Fowler said.” We were following thin, discontinuous ice streaks, and a lot of them ended in huge vertical walls of loose rock. It was very difficult to work out which line would connect to the face.”
Another big issue was the route’s relentless verticality. Much of it was steep snow flutings and WI 3-4 ice, interspersed with short, steep mixed pitches. Ledges were few and far between—which made setting up camp difficult.
“The place was unusually devoid of decent sites for bivouacs,” Fowler said. In some places, they built their own ledges by stacking rocks against the slope. One night, their only option was a narrow catwalk, gently sloping and slick with ice. They spent the night sitting upright, occasionally slipping off the ledge into a startling free hang. This was particularly uncomfortable for Fowler. A survivor of colorectal cancer, Fowler had a good chunk of his rear end removed during an invasive surgery. He also now uses a colostomy bag. Both the scars and the bag make sitting—and hanging in a harness—painful.
“We probably only slept about a half-hour total that night,” said Fowler. “That made the next day of climbing really difficult.” As luck would have it, the sitting bivy lay right beneath the crux pitch: a steep wall they’d been worried about since base camp. Up close, they found it was composed of incredibly loose rock—Fowler’s specialty, if not his preference at that moment.
“This was the pitch that had been weighing most heavily on our minds,” Saunders said. “We thought that if there was a pitch that we’d get turned back by, this was it. We had no idea if we’d be able to do it.”
Any rock that wasn’t frozen together was loose. Stacked flakes of shale lay everywhere. But after a little reconnaissance, Fowler managed to scout a way through the headwall. Saunders followed, tiptoeing through the skittering blocks.
After that, only three pitches of steep snow lay between them and the top. And when they pulled onto the summit, they couldn’t help but smile. “It was one of the best routes we’d done together,” Fowler said.
As for the other secrets to their rarified old, bold status? First, exercising caution. Once settled in base camp, they took more than a week to scope out the route with binoculars and identify the safest possible line.
In general, both men say they’re extremely picky about their choices of objective. (Fowler, for one, favors loose rock less than he used to.) And both are choosy about their partners.
“Over the last 50 years, I’ve had very few climbing partners that I’ve done anything serious with. I can count them on one hand,” says Saunders. “I think it’s good to appreciate what the objective dangers are on a given route. But those are only half the dangers. The other half are the subjective dangers—the people, the egos. One way of staying alive is staying away from dangerous people.”
But the biggest reason they’re still climbing after all these years is much simpler: they love it. They love it enough that it’s worth the pain. It’s worth the achy joints and indigestion, the wind and the cold, the hanging bivies and occasionally leaky colostomy bag. Both Saunders and Fowler are careful to keep ego out of the equation. They climb only for enjoyment—never for glory or gain. That keeps them from getting in over their heads and ensures the stoke remains strong. And, by all accounts, it’s working.
“I don’t think this partnership will end any time soon,” Fowler said. “We already have plans for the next adventure.”
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