Saddened, wisened (and wizened) by many years of expeditioneering, I know that, no matter how much advice, guidance and second-hand experience one is bombarded with, it is only the personal experience of seeing someone dying right before one’s eyes in the mountains that makes one fully understand how swiftly loss of life can come upon us in such hostile terrain. And the dawning of this understanding amounts to a second loss of innocence.

My own loss of innocence occurred on an expedition to Rathong (6,678 metres) in 1992. The peak, in west Sikkim, is tough enough to have been the choice for the selection expedition for the 1965 Indian expedition to Everest. To date, our 1992 expedition has been the only women’s expedition to Rathong. Before setting off, our head Sherpa was briefed on the route by Dorjee Lhatoo, one of the summiteers of the 1964 expedition. ‘The third gully’ was where we had to begin climbing the flank of the mountain.

As it happened, we began looking for the gully much ahead of where we should have. Though it was ostensibly the third gully of the mountainside facing us, we were in reality attempting a section of unstable ice walls. On a beautifully clear day, the sherpas began opening the route and fixing ropes. As one of them front-pointed up an ice wall and drove in a piton, the vibrations made the entire wall collapse. The shower of ice and snow half-buried the Sherpa. The others rescued him but he had suffered massive internal injuries in the fall. They took turns to hoist him on their backs and carry him back to the camp. Cut and bleeding, but conscious, he joined his palms and raised them to the sky. Then he clasped his hands round the neck of the fellow Sherpa carrying him. A minute later, life went out of him.

When they laid the body on the camp ground, the stiffening hands had to be unclasped. The image was to stay with me for long. We abandoned the expedition. Back in my office, I would suddenly look down to find my hands clasped similarly and tears would well up in my eyes.

I would not wish such a painful loss of innocence on those of you who do take up serious, big-time mountain adventure activities. Yet, this poignant memory underlines a cardinal rule of adventure sport — most people, most of the time, make accidents happen. The next season, Lhatoo passed along the same glacier and was shown the accident site. He realised our mistake and said we had headed for a ‘suicidal’ climb.

Even ace mountaineers who climb 8,000-metre peaks

make such suicidal errors of judgement.

In the recent case of 11 mountaineers dying on K2, the survivors said the route-opening team had fixed ropes off the correct route. The would-be summiteers had to shift them. By the time they were placed correctly, much time had been lost. Those who decided it was too late to continue safely and turned back are alive. The ones who died paid not just for the error of the route-openers but also for their own decision to gamble.

It is a well-documented fact that mountaineers who take risks begin by taking small ones. Every time they get by, they become bolder and push the margin of safety even more — until the day the bubble bursts.