Kangchenjunga is the third highest mountain in the world, but its prominence in views from places like Darjeeling gave it a renown in the West long before Everest or K2 were fully surveyed and known to be higher. Due to its position and exposure to monsoon weather, it is particularly prone to avalanches and remains one of the most challenging of the world's great mountains. According to Doug Scott, for one, it is also the grandest.
And Scott, who sadly died in 2020, was as well-qualified as anyone to voice such an opinion. He made the front pages when he and Dougal Haston became the first Britons to climb Everest, as part of Chris Bonington's South-West Face expedition, but he climbed all over the world, generally focusing on climbing challenging objectives in the best possible style. In 1977 he and Bonington made the first ascent of The Ogre (Baintha Brakk) in the Karakoram, a climb which became legendary when Scott both broke legs when abseiling from the summit, leading to an epic descent; one of the great survival stories in world mountaineering.
Two years later, Scott, with Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker, made the third ascent of Kangchenjunga; this came 24 years after the first, a measure of the mountain's difficulty. Like previous ascensionists, they stopped a few metres short of the highest point, respecting the beliefs of the Sikkimese people that the summit is home to the gods.
This climb was a mountaineering landmark for several reasons. It established a new route via the North Ridge, but more significantly, it was the first time an 8000-metre peak had been climbed by an expedition which made no use of bottled oxygen. Messner and Habeler had climbed Everest without oxygen the previous year, but the route was already partly prepared by others using it. Scott, Boardman, and Tasker, along with Georges Bettembourg, established the whole route themselves and no oxygen was used anywhere on the mountain. It's very possible to ague that theirs was the greater achievement; it certainly deserves to be at least equally well remembered as that of Messner and Habeler.
A concise but vivid retelling of this climb forms the final section of this book, but before then we are treated to a comprehensive account of this great mountain. Geology, geography, climate and vegetation are all covered before turning to the human history of the region. There's deep coverage of the early explorations by Westerners, the mapping of the mountain, and the first probes by climbers. Scott is commendably even-handed when dealing with controversial characters like Aleister Crowley and even with the Nazi-sponsored expeditions of the 1930s, though he leaves us in no doubt about leader Paul Bauer's closeness to senior Nazis like Heinrich Himmler and his role in the exclusion of Jews from the German Alpine Club.
All of this reveals that Doug Scott not only displayed a very impressive level of scholarship in researching this book, he also possessed the ability to distil it into highly readable prose; two things which don't automatically go together! It is important to remember that mountains are not merely playgrounds, but mean many things to many different people. And a fuller understanding of a mountain's exploration and climbing history gives us a richer sense of the significance of any one ascent.
I'd like to think that there could be more books like this, giving us the full sweep and context of a mountain's story; the sad thing is that Doug Scott won't be around to write any more of them.