Crowley’s Kangchenjunga Expedition — Four dead in an avalanche the leader would not climb to

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.