Alison sent a radio message to her children from the top of Mount Everest on 13 May 1995, saying that she loved them. Three months later, she died on K2. This is her legacy.
This led her to become the first woman in history to conquer the world’s summit, alone and without bottled oxygen. She was one of the greatest mountaineers in history. From that time, and thirty years later, we can say that of all time. Because she also did it without fixed ropes established by others, in the climb of the highest mountain in the world. An achievement only comparable to that of Reinhold Messner, who had climbed Everest in a similar way.
Her achievement meant a very relevant event for Great Britain, which deserved the front page of The Times, with a headline that said «One of the best climbs in history.»
She recalled that event herself, in what is believed to have been her last interview. “These guys were jumping on me, trying to take pictures,” she said of the photographers waiting for her at London’s Heathrow Airport. “It was just frenetic.”
But the excitement didn’t last long. Exactly three months after Everest, on the evening of August 13, 1995, Hargreaves reached the summit of K2 in Pakistan. A few hours later, she and five others were killed when they were swept away by a storm with fierce winds that ascended the mountain. She was 33 years old.
After her death, a backlash, fueled by the media frenzy around the tragedy, began to circulate. Some called her selfish and criticized the decision to leave young children behind to put themselves in danger. Similar allegations were not leveled so harshly against the parents who died on the mountain alongside her.
Her husband, James Ballard, in a 2002 interview with The Guardian, recalled the events following Alison’s death, and the strong campaign unleashed by the media to question that fact. But it was her daughter, Kate, who years later, definitively put things in their place, with a devastating sentence: “Those who criticized my mother were incorrect and incredibly short-sighted. Twenty years later, with more equality, would they have written the same thing? No.”
In the 2002 interview, James Ballard expressed his disappointment at the way women and mothers are judged for succeeding in their careers, especially the most dangerous ones. “How could I have stopped her?” he said of his wife. “I loved Alison because she wanted to climb to the highest peak that her abilities would allow her. That’s who she was.”
“I just hope there’s a point to Alison’s death and that in the long run what she accomplished helps change attitudes,” she said.
Some would say she did just that. Hargreaves was a “trailblazer,” Molly Schiot, who profiled Hargreaves in her 2016 book, “Game Changers: The Unsung Heroines of Sports History,” once said: “Her courageous Everest climb helped to “break down social constructs of what it means to be a mother.”
On July 28, 2017, at age 52, mountaineer Vanessa O’Brien conquered K2, becoming the first American woman to do so. She also became the oldest.
Two days later, on July 30, she paid tribute to Hargreaves in a Twitter post. “I respect and acknowledge Julie Tullis, and Alison Hargreaves who lost their lives descending K2. I was thinking of them all the time,” she concluded. Tullis died in the same way on K2.
In her final interview, Hargreaves, who began rock climbing at age 13, said Everest was “always in the back of my mind.”
“It was never in the forefront,” she continued. But that changed when she began to consider the possibility of climbing it solo: “I started doing a lot of solo climbs and then I thought it would be cool to try and do Everest completely independently, totally under my own steam, without oxygen.”
Everest was not her only goal. In the summer of 1993, Hargreaves became the first person to climb the famous six great northern faces of the Alps in a single season. The venture inspired her book, “A Hard Day’s Summer.”
In 2015, her son, Tom Ballard, who was 6 when she died, became the first person to solo climb the north faces in winter. Her daughter, Kate, is also a mountaineer.
In a way, Tom’s first ascent in the Alps was with his mother. In July 1988, Hargreaves climbed the treacherous north face of Eiger while six months pregnant. The hike was to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Eiger.
In her final interview, Hargreaves addressed the challenges and inequality faced by female climbers. The interview was conducted on July 27, 1995, at K2 base camp by Matt Comeskey, a fellow climber who survived the storm after returning before the rest of the group. It was obtained by The Independent and published two months later.
“I think women climb before they get married, before they have boyfriends and babies, then they lose interest,” Hargreaves told Comeskey. “Having children is very satisfying, and a lot of people don’t feel the need for anything else.”
But we are talking about her son, Tom Ballard, who repeated his mother’s feat in the Alps. Tom was the first to climb all six major Alpine north faces solo in a single winter season. Sadly, at the age of 31, Tom lost his life alongside Daniele Nardi on Nanga Parbat in February 2019.
A family marked by the mountain, and tragedy. But Alison’s legacy has remained in the history of world mountaineering. And no tragedy can erase that.
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