Why Bernadette McDonald Writes About Climbing’s Toughest Fringe Communities
This story, originally titled “Overlooked,” appeared in our 2024 print edition of Ascent. You can buy a copy of the magazine here.
One of the most shameful facts about the international climbing industry—yes, industry—is that many of the world’s most impressive mountain feats are accomplished by climbers who receive very little acclaim and limited remuneration for their work. Many of these individuals are underequipped and undertrained Nepali and Balti climbers who, time and again, have demonstrated legendary endurance, pain tolerance, and mountain savvy above 8,000 meters. In Bernadette McDonald’s latest book, Alpine Rising: Sherpas, Baltis, and the Triumph of Local Climbers in the Greater Ranges, she describes the intense and often tragic relationship between Western money and Himalayan locals.
These unsung climbers have hauled oxygen tanks for wealthy clients while carrying none of their own, broken trail to the summits of first winter ascents, piggybacked injured Americans off of K2 (more than once), and then sat wistfully in press-room corners while their sponsored European teammates lapped up accolades. Alpine Rising, McDonald’s final book, explores the decades-long trend of Western climbers making mountain history while their unrecognized partners—or, often, guides—are relegated to footnotes. McDonald also highlights their less record-breaking but no less newsworthy acts of kindness and strength. Like Little Karim’s superhuman effort to—single-handedly, and in a single day—ferry food and oxygen from 7,100 meters to 8,100 meters to aid stranded climbers on K2 in 1981. And Abiral Rai’s determination to earn mountain guiding’s prestigious UIAGM certification, despite the Maoists who forced him from his home at age 14 and despite the numerous financial barriers that later blocked his way.
“Emerging from the shadow of systemic colonialism takes time and enormous effort,” McDonald says. Like her other books, she hopes Alpine Rising will help Western readers better appreciate their non-Western contemporaries—names that Greater Range locals have celebrated for years.
McDonald is a titan of Canadian mountain literature. She has written more than a dozen widely acclaimed books—netting multiple international awards—and has spent two decades at the helm of Canada’s prestigious Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival, turning it into the worldwide event it is today.
McDonald’s life has swung between eras of hard work and idyllic recreation. Born in Saskatchewan, she spent her childhood studying music six hours a day and periodically helping at the family farm. She preserved that balance in her college career, where she supplemented her intense music degree with a “relaxing” degree in English literature at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington. After pursuing a graduate degree in music at the University of Western Ontario in 1974, she spent over a decade teaching piano part-time and spending most of her time climbing, skiing, and horsepacking in the mountains—but when she got the chance to work for the Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival in 1988, she dove hungrily into the challenge.
Her first book, Voices From the Summit, was a hard-backed opus celebrating the festival’s 25th anniversary in 2000. It included sweeping essays from Lynn Hill, Riccardo Cassin, Reinhold Messner, and 29 other climbing legends. McDonald says ignorance made her believe she was equipped for such a complicated editorial project. Still, a shrewd editor at National Geographic Books helped make the book a roaring success.
McDonald has since become one of climbing’s great biographers, especially well known for profiling underrepresented and little-known communities. Her widely read 2011 book, Freedom Climbers, chronicles a group of oppressed and impoverished Polish alpinists who emerged from behind the Iron Curtain in the 1970s to make some of the most startling climbs the Himalaya had ever seen, including the first ascent—alpine-style—of 8,611-meter K2’s massive South Face and the infamous 1985 attempt on Gasherbrum IV’s (7,925m) Shining Wall. McDonald got the book idea at a climber party—“a who’s who of high-altitude climbers,” she recalls—in Katowice, Poland, where she’d gone to help organize a mountain film festival. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I really didn’t know about these people, and what a shame that is. I bet I’m not the only one. Someone should do something about that.’” But when McDonald pitched the book around, the literary establishment balked at the proposal. “It’s a niche within a niche,” said one scolding agent. “And the names are difficult to pronounce.” Canada’s Rocky Mountain Books finally gave it a shot in 2008, and after its release three years later, Freedom Climbers won a Boardman Tasker Award and the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Festival Book Competition.
“One of Bernadette’s great talents as a writer is her ability to explain nuanced climbing events in layperson terms,” says Joanna Croston, the current director of the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival & World Tour. “She can explain very naturally what is happening on an extremely technical climb.” Yet while her writing is unburdened by “team-free ascents” and “bomber 0.2 placements” and any other jargony terms that detract from a good tale, it also belongs on the shelves of the most core climbers, helping remind readers what’s most important about this whole endeavor: the people.
McDonald has written several biographies, including of the Himalayan historian Elizabeth Hawley, the Slovenian hardman Tomaž Humar, and Poland’s Voytek Kurtyka, who took a scientist’s approach to experimental suffering in the Greater Ranges. But McDonald’s preternatural gift is profiling entire communities of climbers—a much more challenging task, in many ways, because there are always too many characters and stories to compress the whole tale of a nation into one neatly arced narrative. But McDonald has a way of finding unifying themes in diverse and personal stories, as she demonstrated again with Alpine Warriors, released to great fanfare in 2015, which profiles Slovenia’s burly, worldly alpinists.
McDonald’s voice is as active as ever in her final book, despite COVID-19 forcing her to research and write Alpine Rising without traveling to the communities she hoped to profile. Instead, she connected with Sareena Rai, of the Himalayan Database website, and Saqlain Muhammad Sadpara, a Pakistani filmmaker and climber who personally knew many of the characters. She prepped them to conduct a series of interviews on her behalf. “Sareena and Saqlain were absolutely invaluable,” she says.
McDonald, now 72, says this book will be her last. “I’m burnt out,” she admits. “Alpine Rising was a challenging book to write, and a challenging time to write a book. But there is also the age factor: My energy levels are diminishing.” She sounds shocked rather than wistful of her younger self’s work ethic. But McDonald, who has spent her career profiling climbers frustratingly absent from the limelight, has altruistic reasons, too: “Some people are very good at self-promotion. Or, in some cases, there is a machine that operates to promote them. My motivation for writing has been to increase the exposure of climbing’s amazing, underappreciated characters. Most of the characters in Alpine Rising are the least acknowledged of any climbers I’ve ever written about. It makes sense that this book would be the last.”
It’s a worthy community to end on.
You can buy Alpine Rising here.
To read more from Ascent, visit our table of contents here.
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