8,000M QUEST
P Carlos climbing on the Dhaulagiri Expedition, between Camps I and II, October 2012.
“I HOPE TO CARRY ON CLIMBING FOR AS LONG AS MY BODY ALLOWS.”
R Carlos Soria, Nathi Sherpa and Doctor Carlos
Martínez during the Puja ceremony at Kangchenjunga Base Camp, April 2013.
aid lost by her husband a year ago. An unusual life, one might argue, for a man who
BMC member Jules Stewart is a former Reuters correpondent who lived and climbed in Spain for 20 years. A London- based journalist, he enjoys climbing in the Pyrenees.
worked as an upholsterer from the age of 14 to his retirement at 65. “There were four of us in a little workshop,” he says. “Carrying furniture around certainly contributed to the lower back and knee problems I suffer from today. But I’ve learned to live with this and funnily enough, the pains seem to vanish when I’m in the Himalaya.” Carlos’s fi rst climbing experience in the mountains around Madrid began in his teens. “I was in La Pedriza in the Guadarrama foothills with a friend when I came across an Adventist preacher. He took us to his church and taught us knots and rope work. I was befriended there by members of a vegetarian club who organised trips to the mountains, so I joined. I always stashed some sausage in my rucksack when I went out with them.” His fi rst encounter with high-altitude climbing came in 1960, when he and a friend journeyed to the Alps on a Vespa to test their skills in the Mont-Blanc range. It was 30 years before Carlos conquered his fi rst 8,000 metre peak, Nepal’s Manaslu, which he summited in 2010 after four failed attempts. Since then he has become the only mountaineer to have climbed nine 8,000 metre peaks after the age of 60. He also holds the world age record for K2, Makalu, Gasherbrum and Broad Peak.
Three Himalayan summits, Annapurna, Dhaulagiri and Kangchenjunga, stand between Carlos and full membership of the 8,000 metre club. “I suppose K2 was the trickiest, though I’m not put off by technical diffi culties. But Annapurna is without doubt one of the really dangerous ones. If all goes well, I hope to complete all the 8,000 metre peaks in the next couple of years.” What drives Carlos Soria to risk life and limb and endure the tribulations of the frozen Himalaya, at a stage in life at which most mountaineers have hung up their boots? “It’s what I was born to do,” he says. “But the summit is not the real reward. The moment I embark on an 8,000 metre peak all I think about is getting out of there as quickly as possible. It’s not a fi t place for humans. My mind is 100 percent focused on the descent, which is always the most dangerous part of the climb. I fi nd it almost impossible to sleep when I reach a safe camp, with thoughts of friends and family racing through my mind. The real thrill is not the summit. It is the fi rst rays of dawn lighting up Everest on the ascent, for instance, and the dramatic shadows of the valleys still cast in darkness below.” Soria emphasises that he’s always been a cautious
climber. “If bad weather or avalanche risk are telling you it’s time to descend, I won’t hesitate to do so and I’ve never needed a helicopter rescue,” he says. He holds up his hands, to display 10 sinewy, un-frostbitten fi ngers. “See what I mean?”
So once all the 8,000ers are done and dusted, is Carlos planning to spend his “declining years” at the village tavern sipping coffee and playing cards with fellow pensioners? “Not if I can help it,” he says. “I hope to carry on climbing for as long as my body allows. There are lots of smaller peaks in Hunza (in Pakistan’s Northern Territories), not to mention tempting summits in remote parts of China. I might even go to the Andes and if all this proves impossible, I’m quite happy to go traipsing about my beloved Guadarrama mountains at home.
“The message to people of my age is this: resist the temptation to give up activities you enjoy simply because you’re getting on in years.”
84 | 70TH ANNIVERSARY | FOR BRITISH CLIMBING AND WALKING SINCE 1944
PHOTO: SORIA COLLECTION.
PHOTO: SORIA COLLECTION.
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