MOUNTAINEERING: PUSHED TO THE LIMIT
"I thought this is it: the end,” says Lt Colonel (retd) Dr Abdul Jabbar Bhatti. “If I have to die, it’s better that I sleep. But I couldn’t sleep.” It was nightfall when the retired lieutenant colonel crossed the South Summit after becoming the fourth Pakistani to stand atop of Everest (8,848m). It was May 21, 2017.
He had climbed down without supplemental oxygen and it had taken its toll on Bhatti and his young high-altitude porter, Sange Sherpa. Dr Bhatti had slipped twice, it was getting harder to breathe and he was running out of energy. Despite climbers and sherpas constantly passing them by, no one stopped to help. They were at an altitude of 8,600m. Well past the 7,000m ‘death valley’ mark — when the oxygen in the atmosphere is so low that survival is at best precarious. To top it off, it was dark. He was told that help was only one hour away. But no one came that night. “I thought I’d cut my safety line,” he relates.
Why?
“To die,” he responds. “Then I thought: No. This is suicide — a major sin.” Bhatti did the only thing he could at that point: he prayed. Eventually, he slept.
Abdul Jabbar Bhatti is the fourth Pakistani to summit Mount Everest. The mountaineer found himself on the brink of death on a perilous descent. This is the story of how he survived his greatest climb.
Man in the mountains
Bhatti wasn’t new to the mountains. The 60-year-old Gujranwala native has successfully summited two other 8,000m peaks in the Karakoram range: Broad Peak (8,051m, alpine style) in 1985 and Gasherbrum II (8,035m) in 1986. He was then posted abroad, but adventure had seeped into his soul. In 1988, he trained to be a paragliding pilot in Chamonix (France), which he followed up with additional training in both paragliding and mountaineering until 1990. He returned to Pakistan that year and formed the Pakistan Association of Free Flying (PAFF). In 1991, he led a Pak-German joint medical expedition to Broad Peak. Then in 1993 and 1994, he led an expedition to Chogolisa (7,665m) and Broad Peak, respectively, but they could not summit either. He successfully summited Masherbrum II (7,821m) from its north face — taking the more dangerous route.
In 1996, he was posted to the country’s Northern Areas. In 1997, he was the deputy leader of a group that was to attempt scaling K2 but that never materialised. He returned from his post in the mountains after the Kargil War of 1999, wanting to instead focus on paragliding.
Personal tragedy struck in 2003 when he lost three of his children (two daughters and one son) in a boating accident at Tarbela Dam. Only one son survived. It took him several years to move past his grief. “It was harder for my wife,” he says. In 2008, he “pukka” retired.
Bhatti first wanted to summit Everest in 2011 with mountaineer Hassan Sadpara but they failed to collect sufficient funds. The following year in 2012, as part of a Pak-China expedition, he successfully summited Spantik or Golden Peak (7,027m) in Nagar Valley. His last big mountain summit was on Khosar Gang (6,400m) when Bhatti and his group set out to climb this mountain via a new route. In July 2016, he quietly decided he was going to go to Everest (“I didn’t tell anyone,” he says) and began his training.
The push for the summit