So little Tom was born three months later. Perfectly healthy and ready to follow his mum into the mountains. After all, he had climbed the most fearsome of all Alpine faces – the infamous Eiger Mordwand – before any other climber his age. For Alison Hargreaves, though, it was not an achievement that earned her much admiration. "A selfish mother who fell victim to her own ambitions at the expense of her children." That's the box many people were quick to put her in, and everything else Alison did in the mountains only confirmed their view. Because she was one of the best climbers in the world. Mind you, not just one of the best women climbers – one of the best climbers, full stop. Right up until that expedition to K2.
Like many other great British climbers, Alison Hargreaves spent most of her life in the Peak District. Gritstone edges framed her whole childhood, which she spent tramping around with her parents in hiking boots. At thirteen she got her first taste of climbing. It was bound to happen. She couldn't just keep gazing reverently up at the crags rising all around her. Especially once she found herself in the class of a teacher called Hilary – the wife of mountaineer Peter Boardman, who later, at thirty-one and with an enormous list of even more enormous ascents, vanished on the north-east ridge of Everest.
Back then, nearly everyone at her school climbed. But seeing a woman on the rocks in the seventies and eighties was still anything but common. It raised eyebrows. Maybe even a little disapproval. Alison didn't care. She had finally found a direction for her inner aggression and mental strength. On rock, she moved as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
At eighteen, shortly after leaving school, she met Jim – Jim Ballard. Her future husband, with whom she opened a climbing shop. Alison proudly began writing about her big mountain climbs in London's Alpine Journal, but the even prouder British climbers – men – successfully ignored her despite her success. The young alpinist did, however, catch the eye of American Jeff Lowe. And in 1986 she set off on her first Himalayan expedition.
During an unsuccessful attempt on a new route up Kangtega (6,782 m) with Jeff Lowe, she saw another mountain with her own eyes for the first time. A goddess who bewitched her – Mount Everest. She knew at once that one day – ideally as soon as possible – she had to stand on its summit. Alone and without oxygen. But that was exactly when little Tom came into her life. A tiny person taking shape inside her. Everest was put on hold. But she still dared to take on the Eiger with Tom – and she got a real earful from people for it.
After Tom came Kate, and big climbing had to wait. At most, Alison roamed the crags of the Peak District, usually with the whole family. But her longings didn't go away. Quite the opposite – they piled up one on top of another.
In the summer of 1993 they finally burst to the surface – she decided to climb all six great north faces of the Alps in a single season. Each one in a single day. And solo – completely alone. Nobody had ever done it – the Eiger, the Matterhorn, the Grandes Jorasses, Piz Badile, the Tre Cime di Lavaredo and the Petit Dru. Alison Hargreaves became the first person in the world to do it. And because of the dreadful conditions on the faces that summer, she had to improvise alternative routes on the Eiger and the Grandes Jorasses – the well-known classic lines were out of the question.
Alison became a professional climber. Things were going well in the mountains – but the family climbing shop was struggling. To save it, she and Jim took on debt. A lot of it. It didn't help – they had to close the shop anyway, and suddenly they could barely pay the mortgage on the house they lived in. The debts swallowed everything. Perhaps that's partly why Alison decided to make the most of her popularity and once again planned something nobody had ever done before. Mount Everest, K2 and Kangchenjunga – the three highest mountains in the world in a single year, without oxygen, of course.
She climbed Everest in May 1995. And although a commercial expedition team supported her as far as advanced base camp at 6,400 metres, on the whole of the North Ridge – where George Mallory had climbed in 1924 – Alison played by her own very tough rules. She carried all her gear herself, and she dug and pitched her high camps herself too. She walked past the fixed ropes without a glance and was just as dismissive of offers of tea from other climbers on the route.
A month later she was standing at the foot of K2. Yet the ominous clouds wrapped around the summit seemed to be warning her in advance that something even worse was approaching the mountain.
Several other expeditions were attempting K2 alongside Alison. The weather was bad from the very start. Even so, Alison soon peeked just above the eight-thousand-metre mark – above the fourth and final high camp. After resting, on 9 August she set off for the summit with a group of other climbers. They spent about an hour searching for Camp 3 under the snow. An avalanche had buried it completely – nothing unusual on the slopes of a mountain as brutal as K2. On Saturday 12 August they woke to a clear day at Camp 4, but they were all so exhausted that nobody felt up to going for the top. They planned a serious attempt for the following morning.
Alison Hargreaves left her tent at two in the morning – determined to complete the second stage of her three-summit mission. That day, though, five climbers – among them Peter Hillary, son of the famous Edmund Hillary – turned back before the dreaded Bottleneck, above which a huge serac looms permanently. Hillary didn't like the look of the weather – a bad feeling convinced him to go down.
And he was right. Warm, moist air was pouring up the valley from the south, and its collision with a powerful high-pressure system approaching from the northern, Chinese side of K2 was inevitable.
The storm had already hit nearby Broad Peak, and climbers descending its slopes in the late afternoon watched in horror as figures on K2 – kept going up! Alison knelt in the snow on the summit of K2 shortly after six o'clock, with no idea of the destruction heading her way. The weather above her head was still fairly good. She started down. And soon afterwards the storm struck in full force.
On the exposed crown of K2, Alison, American Rob Slater, New Zealander Bruce Grant and three Spaniards – Javier Escartín, Javier Olivar and Lorenzo Ortiz – were left completely at the mercy of nature's crushing force. Against the sweeping wind, every one of them was utterly defenceless. One after another, the icy hurricane lifted them into the air and hurled their helpless bodies into the gullies of the South Face. Only Canadian Jeff Lakes miraculously made it down to Camp 2, where he died of exhaustion.
When blue sky spread over K2 again a day later, the remaining members of the Spanish expedition, who had managed to retreat in time and sit out the storm in the relative safety of a high-camp tent, spotted an abandoned boot on the slope below Camp 4. Three hundred metres further on, in a completely inaccessible spot, lay a snow-covered body. From the bright green clothing there was no doubt it was her. Britain's greatest woman climber was thirty-three. Her children were four and six.
Tom Ballard, Alison Hargreaves's son, followed in his mother's footsteps in the mountains almost eerily closely. First, in a single winter season, from December 2014 to March 2015, he soloed all six great north faces of the Alps. Then in the winter of 2019, aged thirty, he set off with Daniele Nardi for the eight-thousander Nanga Parbat. Their bodies were found on 9 March 2019 – after they had stopped communicating with the world on 24 February.
Alison Hargreaves was, according to her friends, not a selfish mother at all. On the contrary, she was a family-oriented woman who often took her husband (also a climber) and both children along on her climbing trips.
