Footsteps
Footsteps
“So many times you hear about mountaineering expeditions and you only see the gnarly, frostbitten bit… The hardcore stuff,” says Pauline Sanderson. “Whereas actually, most mountaineering expeditions I've been on are fun!” Pauline speaks with authority on this subject. She’s climbed a handful of mountains over 7,000m (including an expedition to Everest from sea level) and she’s spent several years operating an expedition company out of Nepal. Pauline left the Himalaya in 1999 and returned to climb Everest and Lobuje East in the late 00s. A few years later, she found herself back in Nepal in the Jugal Himal region, helping with relief efforts after the devastating earthquake in 2015. It was at this point that the idea for a different kind of expedition began brewing in her mind.
Footsteps | Teaser
The Jugal Himal range is home to 14 peaks over 6,000m but the region has been largely overlooked by mountaineers for decades. Located in the central Himalayas, 140 km from Kathmandu, it sits on the border between Nepal and Tibet. Once inaccessible due to Maoist conflicts and with no behemoths over 7,000m the attention of expeditions has been largely drawn elsewhere. Working with local communities led to a deep connection with the region, and Pauline’s enthusiasm was piqued further when she came across the book, ‘Tents in the Clouds’ - the account of the first all-female team to explore the Himalayas.
In 1955, after casting around for a Himalayan region that had yet to be explored, three female Scottish mountaineers, Evelyn Camrass, Monica Jackson, and Elizabeth Stark, were encouraged to try the Jugal. They undertook a monumental challenge, pioneering a successful three-month expedition in a wild, remote region. They navigated with inaccurate maps and without today’s high-tech gear. “They didn't have these beautiful down jackets and these beautiful down sleeping bags… We're pretty soft compared to them. It’s nuts!” reflects Pauline. Despite these limitations, they successfully climbed to the head of the Jugal Glacier and then scaled the south face and upper southwest ridge of a 6,705m peak. The peak was climbed subsequently by two Japanese expeditions in the 60s, but remarkably, it wasn't until 2019 that anyone officially climbed in the region again. An all-Nepalese expedition, with six amateur members (two women and four men) and four professional Nepalese guides, successfully climbed a neighbouring summit and reignited interest in the area.
“I think it's quite hard nowadays to find an adventure that really is an adventure in its pure terms,” says Pauline. “I wish I had been born a bit earlier!” For Pauline, Jugal offered that rare chance for a “pure” adventure in a region virtually unexplored since 1955. After a few years of scheming, her husband finally told her she “needed to get this out of her system,” – she couldn’t deny it.
“The Mount Everest Foundation was saying, ‘We need more women expeditions!’ So, I called Emma and I said, Emma, I need youth. I need expertise. I need a good team. What do you think?” Emma Holgate is a senior instructor at Glenmore Lodge. She’s practical, highly skilled, and so long as Pauline allowed her to take her skis (“The skiing bit is the fun, that was like my comfort zone,”), she didn’t take much persuading. While Emma was an easy "yes," finding two other women with the right skills and flexibility for such an expedition proved challenging. After some consideration, Emma suggested Lucy Dowland and Sarah Crowsley. Both freelance mountaineering and climbing instructors at Glenmore Lodge, and both with experience working in the harsh environments of Antarctica.
Their mission was not only to ascend an unclimbed peak, but to explore whether future adventure tourism would be welcomed by local communities. They wanted to work with the locals to find ways to facilitate expeditions there while being sensitive to the pristine environment. “It was pretty exciting, that concept of… Wow, we're going to go over 4,000 metres and we’ll have a base camp that actually, nobody had really been to before,” says Emma.
“I guess for mountaineers and climbers to achieve some of these incredible things that they do, they've got to push beyond those thoughts. They've got to push beyond considerations and they've got to take risks. So, it comes into this massive debate about risk and where you draw the line.”
While Pauline had eight high altitude mountains under her belt, the three instructors had limited experience above 4,000m. “Pauline’s the old bird with the altitude experience, so I suppose we were looking for a fairly low-tech summit to do because we figured the three of us would be learning so much along the way,” says Emma. Using Fatmap and with help from one of the Nepalese team from the 2019 expedition they were able to narrow down their options. “We were limited on information but what we did have was an ascent of Jugal 5 happen within our planning time, which gave us a bunch of images to look at. We figured if we could get to Jugal 5, which looked like a very nice trekking peak, then we could potentially explore the ridgeline and climbing beyond it,” says Emma. “But honestly the rest of the mountains there… They may not be super high but they looked nails!”
The film, “Footsteps” follows the four women from their arrival in the foothills to the lofty heights of Jugal’s peaks. Alongside their local team of porters, cooks, guides and an environmental ranger, they journey to base camp and beyond towards their summit objective. The team deal with tent-flattening storms, tackle the realities of more people treading the mountain trails (“so the rubbish is one thing. The toilet thing is a whole different article…!”) and get to enjoy first tracks on a Himalayan mountain.
They face up to the sobering risks of mountaineering first-hand, when a far-less-fastidious team make a summit attempt on a bad weather day that the women had deemed un-climbable. Helpless from the other side of the glacier, they watch on as the team are avalanched. “People are driven by different things, aren't they?” reflects Pauline. “The expedition we were watching was a mixture. There was money involved. There was ego involved and there was pride involved. Our expedition was simpler. It was a friendship expedition going off to try and have a lovely time and do something ethical.” As it transpired there were no fatalities, but the proximity of the accident brings the seriousness of their own objective into sharp relief. “I guess for mountaineers and climbers to achieve some of these incredible things that they do, they've got to push beyond those thoughts,” says Emma. “They've got to push beyond considerations and they've got to take risks. So, it comes into this massive debate about risk and where you draw the line.”
If Footsteps has a motto then it’s “Safety, Fun, Summit” - strictly in that order. Emma admits that “there were points on the expedition that Lucy, Sarah and I all had the summit fever,” and the film gets up close to show the discussions, fears and challenges that all stand in the way of reaching an unclimbed peak. What makes this film so engaging is perhaps the happy accident that the women ended up filming the entire thing for themselves. “We were supposed to have a film guy there to help me out filming the approach to basecamp. But once we met him we ran with it for a few days and it just wasn't going to work, he wasn’t a mountain man.” Ever adaptable, Emma took the job of camera woman and director upon herself. With a cue card from the film team back in the UK with the settings for the camera written down in case things went wrong, she proceeded to capture the whole adventure with the help of a local assistant. “The poor producers had about 128 hours of footage in the end that they had to get down to just 32 minutes!”
During the expedition planning, the women prioritised setting an example of best-practice, low-impact mountaineering, focusing on human waste and litter management and engaging the local community. They organised an environmental ranger to join them on the expedition and sought practical solutions to keep the region unspoiled. “I know the positive difference adventure tourism can make in these communities... But you can’t presume people want it,” says Pauline. However, the team received enthusiastic support from locals and collaborated with them to develop ideas such as composting toilets and recycling initiatives to help communities generate income. After the expedition, Pauline met with Jugal authorities to present their ideas. The authorities then spent two days creating the Jugal Municipality Guidelines for Expeditions. “It's like having all the important business owners of Strathspey coming together with the council and agreeing on guidelines for hill walkers and mountaineers in the Cairngorms,” explains Emma. “It’s on that sort of scale, it was a pretty big deal.”
In late August 2023 the Nepalese Mountaineering Council opened the Jugal Himal for climbing permits. While the Footsteps team were some of the first to take advantage of this new opportunity, they hope their expedition and film will inspire a future of prosperous, environmentally friendly expeditions. “I hope it does inspire, especially more women,” says Emma. “We see so many high-profile alpinists climbing amazing new lines, and I think that maybe makes it seem out of reach. For us, just to get to high camp and ski on that glacier… I hope people feel inspired to give things like this a go, experience new cultures and communities - it doesn’t have to be hardcore.” Pauline agrees, urging others not to be intimidated by the idea of a Himalayan adventure. “Don’t be scared of the word Himalaya. It’s the same skill sets that you need in Europe, in Scotland, or in the Lakes. You just have to take into account the altitude, but it adds a whole level of experience that’s hard to put into words. It will add value to your life… You don’t have to be at the top of the game to enjoy a Himalayan expedition.”
For the four women, following the 1955 team’s journey was about celebrating the spirit of those early pioneers and truly enjoying the journey. While they didn’t leave with a first ascent, they returned with the satisfaction of the first skiing expedition in Jugal, and a joyous first ski descent from above high camp to the glacier. But will they be going back to try again any time soon? “I’d love to go back at some stage,” says Emma. “Now we know it so well, I’d like to go back and put the pieces of the jigsaw together, see all the friends we made and maybe try for a summit attempt on a true mountaineering expedition.” As for Pauline, she’s satisfied with all she’s achieved. “I'm seriously quite happy now,” she says. “I'd love to just go out and go for a little walk with my husband. Just to look at all the mountains we've done. I’d go sit in the teahouses and meet old people and tell people what we did when we were young.”
Watch Footsteps here.
Find out more about the Jugal Himal in the new book, Jugal Himal: Last Treasure of the Himalayan Frontier by Milan Tamang, with foreword by Pauline Sanderson.
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