Crowley’s Kangchenjunga Expedition — Four dead in an avalanche the leader would not climb to
Summary
On 1 September 1905, an early attempt on Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain on Earth, ended in an avalanche on the Yalung face that killed the Swiss climber Alexis Pache and three local porters. The expedition was co-organized by the Swiss doctor and photographer Jules Jacot-Guillarmod and led on the mountain by the British occultist Aleister Crowley. The disaster came amid an open revolt against Crowley's leadership; the slide struck a party descending in the late afternoon, and Crowley, hearing the survivors' cries from his tent at a higher camp, did not climb down to help. The four dead were left where the snow buried them.
The attempt was one of the first serious efforts on Kangchenjunga, made decades before the technology and acclimatization practices that would eventually allow an ascent in 1955. The climbers approached from the south, up the Yalung Glacier, and pushed a chain of camps onto the steep, avalanche-prone face — terrain whose danger Crowley himself reportedly recognized, having warned against descending it late in the day. The expedition reached roughly 6,500 metres, far below the 8,586-metre summit, before friction over Crowley's autocratic command brought it to the brink of collapse.
The episode is remembered chiefly for Crowley's conduct: his refusal to leave his tent as men died below, his cold dismissal of the accident, and his departure for Darjeeling the next morning past the disaster site without stopping, carrying with him the expedition's funds. The judgement of mountaineering history has been severe. But the deeper record is also a sober one about early Himalayan climbing — the lethal avalanche exposure of the great faces, the absence of any rescue capacity, and the routine erasure of the local porters who made up most of the dead and most of the labour, and whose names the record never preserved.
Timeline
A face no one had yet beaten
In 1905 Kangchenjunga stood among the great unclimbed problems of the Himalaya. The third-highest mountain on Earth at 8,586 metres, it rises on the border of present-day Nepal and the Indian state of Sikkim, and it is notorious even now for steep, heavily loaded snow slopes that shed avalanches without warning. The expedition approached from the south, up the Yalung Glacier toward the immense southwest, or Yalung, face — a line suggested by the surveys of Douglas Freshfield and illustrated by Vittorio Sella's photographs from a circumnavigation of the massif in 1899. No party had climbed anywhere near the summit of an 8,000-metre peak; the science of acclimatization was rudimentary, the equipment primitive, and the very survivability of the high Himalaya unknown. Any serious attempt was an experiment with lives.
The party was an uneasy alliance. Jacot-Guillarmod, a physician and accomplished alpine photographer, had conceived and largely financed the venture and recruited Crowley, with whom he had climbed on K2 in 1902, to lead on the mountain. With them came Charles-Adolphe Reymond and Alexis Pache, both Swiss, and Alcesti C. Rigo de Righi, an Italian hotel manager from Darjeeling who served as transport officer. Around them worked some 230 local porters — the men who carried the food, fuel and shelter up the glacier and onto the face, and who would account for three of the four eventual dead. Crowley, already notorious in Britain as an occultist, commanded with an autocratic harshness that grated on the Europeans and, by several accounts, on the porters he drove and at times struck. The expedition's chain of command was a fault line from the start.
Revolt on the snow
Through August the team pushed camps up the Yalung face. The route was steep and the snow unstable; a porter was killed in a fall during the build-up, an early and ignored warning. By the end of the month Crowley's leadership had become intolerable to his partners. He insisted on his own line and pace, dismissed the others' judgement, and clashed openly with Jacot-Guillarmod and de Righi over how — and how safely — to proceed.
On 1 September the high party, Crowley with Pache, Reymond and a group of porters, reached about 6,500 metres before a small avalanche unnerved them and forced a retreat. That afternoon the simmering dispute boiled over: Jacot-Guillarmod and de Righi confronted Crowley and tried to remove him from command. The argument went unresolved, and rather than wait, a group set off down the face late in the day, against Crowley's stated warning that descending the slope so late was dangerous — roped together in a single line, the most exposed possible arrangement on avalanche terrain. It was the worst hour and the worst configuration for what came next.
The slide, and the man in the tent
As the roped party descended, a slip — by one or two of the porters, in most accounts — set the loaded slope in motion. The slip became a slide and the slide became a cascade of snow and ice that swept the whole rope down roughly 150 metres into a gully and buried the lowest men under several metres of debris. Alexis Pache and three porters were killed, suffocated beneath the snow. De Righi was partly buried and dug out alive; Reymond, who had been higher, escaped and went at once to the survivors and to dig for the dead.
Crowley was in his tent at a camp above. He heard what he later described as frantic cries from below. He did not go down. By his own subsequent account he had advised against the descent and felt the disaster vindicated him; he wrote to a Darjeeling newspaper that "a mountain accident of this sort is one of the things for which I have no sympathy whatever," and stayed where he was while Reymond worked alone on the slope below. The bodies could not be recovered before nightfall. The next morning, 2 September, Crowley left the mountain for Darjeeling, passing the site of the avalanche without stopping to help or to speak to the survivors, and carrying with him the expedition's funds — money largely put up by Jacot-Guillarmod, who later recovered it only under threat of exposing Crowley's private writings. Pache and the three porters were left in the snow that killed them.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
Four people died — Alexis Pache and three porters — and the expedition ended in recrimination. The bodies were not recovered; the dead remained on the Yalung face. Crowley's conduct, his refusal to descend, his published contempt for the accident, and his departure with the funds made the episode one of the most notorious in the history of mountaineering, and it effectively ended his climbing career: his former companions, Eckenstein among them, would not climb with him again. Jacot-Guillarmod, who had financed and conceived the venture, was left to settle the wreckage and to grieve the men lost on a mountain that had never been seriously threatened.
Kangchenjunga itself would not be climbed for another half-century, until a British expedition reached its summit ridge in 1955 — stopping just short of the top by agreement with the people of Sikkim, for whom the mountain is sacred. The 1905 attempt is remembered now less as a mountaineering milestone than as a moral one, a case study in how an expedition's command and ethics can fail as lethally as its terrain. The fairest reckoning centres the dead, all four of them, including the three porters whom triumphalist and sensational accounts alike have tended to forget, and treats the famous leader not as a villain to be relished but as the proximate cause of a needless loss on a dangerous mountain.
Lessons
- Never descend avalanche terrain late in the day, on warming snow, roped in a single string — the timing and the configuration each multiply the toll of one slip.
- Settle command before the climb; a leadership dispute resolved on the mountain, in anger, produces exactly the rushed, divided decisions that kill.
- Build the team to be its own rescue, and hold leaders to the duty to act — on remote faces, refusing to help is not neutrality but a second, avoidable failure.
- Count and credit every member of an expedition equally; the porters and local workers who bear most of the risk must be named and mourned, not erased.
- Respect a mountain's demonstrated hazards — a route that has already shed snow and killed is telling you the truth about itself.
References
- 1905 Kanchenjunga expedition WIKIPEDIA
- The 70th Anniversary of the First Ascent of Kangchenjunga EXPLORERSWEB
- Legends Series: Aleister Crowley EXPLORERSWEB
- Aleister Crowley ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA