Golden Star Staff
Imagine a grueling story of survival and perseverance, and on Halloween Doug Scott will give a series of public illustrated presentations depicting just how scary a Crawl Down the Ogre is.
Scott is introduced by his old friend and veteran mountaineer Rob Wood. The famous British Himalayan climber and photographer, known in the international climbing community as “the great survivor,” tells the Ogre story in Golden preceding his already sold out presentation in Banff the next day.
Scott and Chris Bonington, icons of British mountaineering, made the first ascent of the 7,285-metre high Baintha Brakk, also known as The Ogre. Their climb in the Karakoram in 1977 extended the boundaries of what had been achieved before at that altitude, but it was the subsequent descent from the summit in the dark, turning a catalogue of disasters into an epic journey. The Ogre wasn’t climbed again for another 24 years.
The story of this expedition has since entered mountaineering folklore as one of the most dramatic stories of hard climbing, team work, and survival against all odds recounted in Scott’s famously laconic and humorous style. The talk has been refreshed with the aid of newly discovered photographs and material from diaries from other members of the team, Bonington, Nick Estcourt, and Clive Rowland, plus film and audio tapes recently discovered in an attic and made by the late Mo Anthoine on the expedition.
After the Scott’s main presentation there will be an opportunity for questions and answers and sales of signed copies of Scott’s recently published autobiography Up and About and his new book The Ogre – Biography of a mountain, and the dramatic story of the first ascent, and Wood’s books, At Home in Nature and Towards the unknown mountains. Doug’s book
The Ogre has just been included on a short list of six mountaineering books for this year’s Boardman Tasker award.
Scott’s presentation will be at the Golden Civic Centre on October 31 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available at the Art Gallery of Golden, Bacchus Books, or at the door.
