This October will be the 18th anniversary of my cousin, Ian Kerr, going missing in the Himalayas. The rest of this post consists of an article by Paul Nunn published in High Magazine in 1995. He attempted to find evidence of what happened to Ian and his friends. The photographs in the piece were taken by Ian Fox’s, one of the members of the missing party, parents in 1987, the year following their disappearance.
Missing: The story of the search for four British climbers who disappeared in India
In the autumn of 1986, four instructors working at Plas-y-Brenin Mountaineering Centre: lan Fox, lan Kerr, Dave Woolridge and Steve Briggs, applied for a permit to climb Hagshu, an unclimbed mountain in Kashmir but the Indian government refused them as an American team already had permission; they decided to go anyway and have a look at the area. Although all of them were experienced mountaineers and had between them climbed extensively in the Alps, none of them had been to the Himalaya before and, having chosen their first objective and had it refused by the government they were loath to try and find something else, their hearts being set on Hagshu.
So, when a few weeks before their departure they heard on the grapevine that the Americans had decided not to go they were really pleased. It meant that they would be able to go on the mountain and nobody would know. It was too late to reapply so they would have to go illegally. Hence, they never came right out and admitted they were actually going to go and try and climb the peak, only that they were going to go into the area and ‘have a look’ and that in itself was the root of all the problems, because when it came down to it nobody knew where they were going.
Overdue, whereabouts unknown
Their families knew exactly when they were due back. So, after they had been overdue for about three/four weeks and the authorities had been contacted in Delhi and nothing had been heard, Chris Fox and Mike Woolridge, brothers of two of them, decided that they would go out and look for them and set off for Delhi in December from where they managed to get the starting out point for the walk into Hagshu but by that time it was winter and a lot of snow had fallen. They talked to all the people they could find who might have seen the boys or talked with them, but discovered nothing. They then got to Gulhar, which is about 30 miles further on but were stopped by heavy snowfall and returned to Delhi, hoping to get an army helicopter to fly over the area but got nowhere. So, they returned to Britain at New Year, to the distraught families, with nothing, not even an inkling of what might have happened.
In 1987, in June, four of us went out again, with the small hope that somehow they may have been caught somewhere by the early heavy snows of the winter. We followed their footsteps from Kishtwar, up the Chenab valley to Atholi, and then on up the track towards Umasi La, as far as. the village of Machel. The policeman there remembered them. He had their names written in his book and they had spent a night with him and that was the last record there was.
We carried on, left the Umasi La track and fought our way up the Hagshu Nulla, to the Hagshu La. There were enormous amounts of snow and before we even got anywhere near we realised that our chances of finding anything were slim. I remember standing on the col wondering where they were and knowing that there was almost no hope of finding anything and that we would have to go home empty-handed and face the families for some of whom we were the last hope.
We carried on down into Zanskar, eventually finding the mountain they had come to climb, Hagshu. It is a difficult peak to find as it does not appear on any map and is hidden from the Kashmir side by a series of complex ridges. This obviously was a better way to approach for future reference.
So we also went home with nothing, and in the intervening years, Ray and Jean Fox have trekked into the area and Ray has been with the Indians on an aerial reconnaissance. John Barry has been on the North Face of Hagshu several times and the mountain has been climbed by at least a British team and a Polish one. No one has found anything.
A chance encounter
In February ‘94 we were back in Zanskar again, on a winter expedition this time with the rather fanciful name of ‘Ice Trek’, to try and go down the Zanskar river gorge and attempt the first winter ascent of Stok Kangri.
After our trip, while back in Leh, about two hours before I was due to fly back to Delhi, I was talking to Sonam Dorjay, the tourist officer, when I reluctantly mentioned that I had been in Zanskar previously to search for my four missing friends. To my surprise, he said that he knew all about it.
He had first heard about it in 1986 when it had happened, but as no one had seen anything on this side of the mountains he had thought no more about it. Then about a year and a half before, at the end of a very hot summer, a man from Padum had come to see him and told him that he had found some tattered clothing and some diaries (books with writing he called them) in the area which, when Sonam described it, sounded like the Hagshu Nulla, where the boys were thought to have gone, where we had gone but found nothing because of the snow. This was the first lead we had had to what might have happened.
In due course, Chris Fox, Mandy Glanville and I decided to go back and look again and flew out to Delhi at the beginning of September 1994. Having talked to lots of people we decided that this would be the time when there would be the least amount of snow, the weather reasonably stable and the best chance of finding anything there was to find. We planned to try and meet up with John Barry at his Base Camp below Hagshu Peak and hoped that he would come with us over the Hagshu La.
On our return, the Indians were very helpful and interested and arranged for us to take a government jeep as far as Kargil. Sonam Sorjay was also able to come with us and had been able to contact Amin, who had found the tatters of clothing and book, who lived in Padum, to tell him that we were coming and to make himself ready to come with us. They really couldn’t have been more helpful. We then had ‘the journey from hell’ getting to Padum. It was awful, 34
hours non-stop travel, nine in a jeep, two hours rest and then 23 in a lurching truck. We got to Padum about 11am and we were absolutely wrecked and Mandy was burning up with a fever.
It was funny seeing Padum without any snow. When I was there in the winter it was completely covered and now there was none and looked totally different. Sonam had managed to find Mr Amin for us and when we spoke to him we discovered that he had actually found quite a lot more than Sonam had described to me the previous year.
We had thought that when Sonam said he had found books with writing that it might have been diaries and also that he’d found tatters of clothing, but what he had actually found was bits of tent, some food, a stove and some books, but not diaries.
Mandy, unwell, decided to stay behind but importantly Amin was able to accompany us. This was a great ride, much better than the previous day’s and took about two hours in the morning sun. Zanskar is such a beautiful place, it is really hard to describe. It is completely locked in from both ends and is only open for about three months a year. It’s just a huge wide valley, very green, very fertile in the bottom, with a few houses scattered around and lovely people. I
Leaving the truck at Abring we set off really slowly skirting the right-hand side of the moraine as it started to rain. From about a mile or so down we could start to see the Hagshu Face when it came out of the cloud, and made camp about four in the afternoon on the side of and above the moraine of which there was miles and miles; horrible, hummocky, loose and disgusting. When we went down it in ‘87 it was covered in snow and was one of the worst days I have ever had in the mountains. I was glad Amin was with us as I doubt if we’d have ever found the path by ourselves.
After about an hour and a half of walking the next day we came upon John Barry’s camp site from where he joined us across endless moraine. We went across the tongue of the glacier and ended up camping on the other side, just below the Hagshu La.
We had a good night in the tent where I lay thinking it was raining a lot but when we woke up the next morning it turned out to have been about six inches of snow. We packed everything up and set off to go up over the Hagshu La. It was quite straightforward. We were just plodding exceptionally slowly It had been far too fast to come up. It was our third day and we were coming up to 5,000m, how Chris and I were not ill I don’t know. Fortunately I seemed to have acclimatized really well although we both had very slight headaches. So we puffed and wheezed our way up to the top by which stage it was really snowing and really blowing, and was freezing. It was nothing like I remembered and nothing like John remembered and he’s been over it twice. It’s such a complex place, even the cols are complicated. I’m sure if it had been clear weather we would have seen it without any problem. We just couldn’t see anything. We were staggering along with our hoods up. Eventually there was a very slight clearing and Amin, having made several doglegs through this deep snow, with Chris actually getting his compass out at one stage, we managed to locate the top of the col. Then it was just a slog down a couloir on the other side probably about 700ft or so, through thigh deep snow.
We ploughed down to the bottom of the couloir. About 300m further down the glacier we stopped, as Amin had said that the place where he had found the tent was near the snout. What we saw looked nothing like it was when we had been there before. We camped on the glacier, quite close to the spot where Amin though he had seen the stuff.
A hopeless search
There are just so many things that could have happened there. Both John and I had often thought that they may have been ambushed by militants and certainly hearing what some of the papers say about the locals being raided in Atholi by terrorists it certainly sounds likely but looking at this spot, it was so far away from anywhere it was hard to imagine that militants would follow them all the way up. We started digging in the spot where Amin indicated he had found the stuff. Funnily enough, in the cave where the porters were staying, Chris had found a book and some tatters of clothing and a piece of film. The book could well have been that which Amin had found previously. Certainly it was a book, or half a book, in English and it was a book which Chris was pretty sure that Ian either had or had the sequel to. It looked like Hotel New Hampshire but we couldn’t find a title. The tatters of material certainly could have been from a tent as these things were found in the cave, I guess it is possible that people could have passed by, taken what they could carry from the site and dumped these bits in the cave. It’s unlikely that the boys would have camped in the cave and camped nearby because the distance was too short
So we started digging and we dug and dug and dug. Had we been there a week before there would have been no snow because all the snow had fallen in the last few days. Anyway we didn’t find anything, Amin just wasn’t ’sure if this was the exact place. Then it got really cold and started to snow. It was tragic because if there had been no snow, we would have been able to see into the crevasses, under rocks and into the ice. Amin said that all the things he saw were in the ice so we had to get to the ice first because there was so much snow on top of it.
I just couldn’t believe we had come all this way after all the years and there was so much snow. A week before there had been nothing. That night we talked and had lots of theories but at the end of the day I didn’t think we would ever really know. Surely if there had been a tent there we would have found it by now. What seemed so disgusting was that the deputy magistrate who had originally been there with Amin told him to leave it all. They just left, walked past it and told nobody whereas if he’ d just looked, dug it up and brought some of it down and told somebody about it, maybe we would have at least been able to confirm it was them. God only knows what had happened to it but we certainly couldn’t find it. It sounded suspiciously like it might just have been just a cache, a tent left there with a few bits of food and bits and pieces while they went on to try and look for the Hagshu La, because if they had come up here with really loaded sacks… there were just so many scenarios… and it wasn’t easy to see the Hagshu La from there, then they might have just decided to leave some stuff here and carry on and look for Hagshu with light sacks.
The next morning we dug again, everywhere it was conceivable that they might have, put a camp site. We dug in straight lines down to the ice. By the afternoon it had started to look like the ‘Battle of the Somme’, trenches everywhere, full of water as it had been raining all day and even Amin said that it was just so changed even from two years ago, that he was just not sure. I felt sorry for him as he was so keen to help us find what we had come for and had been so positive he could. He said the glacier had changed, the stones have changed, the snow had changed. I didn’t think we were going to find anything. We gave up digging. We couldn’t see into the crevasses as there was too much snow. If they had been killed by militants then that’s where they would have put the bodies.
A last minute discovery
It was still snowing when we got up next morning and packed up all our things. Then, just as we were leaving desperately disappointed, one of the porters saw something in the snow, quite a long way from where we had been digging about 50m further up the hill. It was a piece of a tent. So we started hacking at the ice uncovering more. There were shreds of green material and brown and yellow, like a Phoenix tent possibly. We found bits of stove, insides of wine boxes, some rations that Chris had given to Ian, special ones that he had got from somewhere that he recognized, a T-shirt, a pair of sandals, a toothbrush, bits of batteries, razors, but nothing absolutely conclusive except that it was obviously someone English as we found another book, Memories of Remarkable Men, something that Ian Kerr would probably have read. Then suddenly Sonam dug up a diary. This was unbelievable. It had been lying open and was very muddy, the year 1986 written on the front. The first thing I saw written on the page where it was open was the word ‘Dollgellau’ so we were then pretty sure it was one of theirs and then I tried to open it a bit more. It was very, very soggy and very dirty and I managed to open it at the address page. I ran my eyes down the list of names and the first one that sprang out that I knew was Dave Monteigh and by then I was sure it was one of theirs. So very, very gently and carefully I tried to open it around the time we thought they would have been there. On the 29th September the entry read ‘Made a base camp in the Hagshu Nulla’ which was presumably where we were digging, and then on 30th September it just read ‘Rest day’, and then on the 1st October it read ‘Recce trip to the Hagshu La, attention captured by Chiring Peak’ and that was it. Nothing else. So I guess whatever happened, happened the night of 1st October or on the 2nd. We hacked some more, found lots more bits of tent, some string and bits out of a first aid kit, pills and a crepe bandage but worst of all was that it was all underneath rocks, very big rocks, and after a while we really just had to give up. There was just so much snow. It was snowing really heavily as we were doing it. We tried looking further up the hill as the actual site of the camp was probably further up and it would have been pushed down by the glacier and/or the rocks during the years but found nothing.
It had changed radically from two years before, but it is on a glacier, and could have changed a lot more in the eight years since they first went missing. Loads of rocks had come down so it was conceivable that they had been buried under them one night while they were asleep. It’s really hard to say. The only problem with that idea is that we didn’t actually find any rucksacks, boots, climbing hardware or ropes which were the most important things we didn’t find but the site had definitely been pillaged. We know that because of what Coos found down in the cave below, the bit of book, the tent fabric and the piece of film. People will have walked past the site before Amin ever found it, six years later. It was just too difficult to try and reach any conclusion but at least we know it was them, that they were there and that the accident, whatever it was, happened around the 1st or 2nd October 1986. At least they no longer have ‘disappeared without trace’. We took some pictures leaving everything where we had found it. There was nothing really we could take anyway that would mean anything apart from the diary and the book which was just a sodden mass. So we just left it all there, where it had lain for eight years and set off back up to the Hagshu La. I don’t know if we should do any more, that is up to the parents and the next of kin. I wanted to write this article to remind people. I wanted their friends and the people who knew them and cared about them, to know what we had found because these things are important.