This first photo feature of the Hard Travel newsletter comes from Pat Morrow. Pat is the second Canadian to summit Everest, and the first person to do the Seven Summits (Carstensz Pyramid version). He’s spent his life photographing and filming mountain culture, climbing, skiing, hiking, rafting, caving, and canyoneering. And he once even spent three thoroughly enjoyable days cooped up in a hut at -50˚C in the Canadian Arctic with Ed Hillary and Neil Armstrong.
I first made contact with Pat via a mutual friend who arranged for me to review his book Searching For Tao Canyon which recalls Pat and friends time exploring and photographing the slot canyons of the Colorado Plateau. Pat might be pushing 70 but he continues to ski, climb and photograph near his home in British Columbia, where he lives with his wife Baiba, also a well known adventure writer and photographer.
As of 2021, Pat Morrow has logged over 1000 days in the Himalaya, working as a cameraman and/or stills shooter on 6 mountaineering expeditions and on 21 treks lasting from 30 to 80 days.
As an “antidote” to four slavish years dedicated to solving the logistical, political and financial challenges of an endeavour in which hardly any climbing was done, (the Seven Summits) Baiba and I wanted to simply go and travel in the mountains without spending months planning and fund raising.
In the summer of 1987, we launched out on a wild 10,000 km overland journey around the Himalaya with friends Jeremy Schmidt and Wendy Baylor.
On the first part of the journey we chose to use mountain bikes (they were decidedly low tech in those days) for two reasons: for autonomous travel in a part of Asia where public transport was sporadic to non-existent; and to move slowly through the landscape and meet the nomads and pastoralists we encountered along the way.
It was a kind of reconnaissance to check out prime locations and mountain cultures that we would return to (in some cases, many times) on photo and film assignments in subsequent years.
Our friend Lynn Martel, nicely summarised these many months in the Himalaya, in a booklet called “Focused on Adventure…Portrait of Pat Morrow” for the Alpine Club of Canada’s biographical Summit Series.
Setting out from Lhasa in June, the two couples pedaled mountain bikes across the western edge of the remote and arid Tibetan Plateau—despite the fact it was illegal to travel on any kind of privately owned vehicle at the time—and crammed themselves into overloaded Chinese and Indian trucks, boarded buses piloted by “manic” drivers and trekked on foot.
Along the way they journeyed into northern Pakistan via the treacherous Karakorum Highway, through Baltistan, Kashmir, Garwhal, and eastern Nepal. Covering 10,000 kms, the journey resulted in magazine articles and Jeremy’s book, Himalayan Passage, illustrated by Pat’s photographs.
“The big trip was a reaction against having wasted so much time planning the Seven Summits,” Pat says, and adds: “An unintended consequence of pioneering the logistics and political permissions for two of the hardest to reach summits, in Australasia and Antarctica, is that now well healed scramblers such as dentists, lawyers and used car salesmen can be guided to the tops of the continents en masse.”
”In order to make the circum Himalayan journey happen, Canada’s (now defunct) Equinox magazine gave us a couple of assignments to do adventure stories, one on caving in Guilin, China, and another profiling the work of Canadian biologist Don Reid who was studying pandas at the Wolong Panda Reserve (which was set up by George Schaller who we would accompany many years later on a committing donkey and camel caravan into the Kunlun Range in search of the birthing grounds of the endangered Tibetan antelope).
Those stories covered our airfare. It only cost about five grand each, because we were basically camping the whole way. We had bikes for a big part of it. That was amazing, just crossing Tibet and going into western China where I’d been in 1981 climbing 7,500m Mt Muztagata and descending on my telly skis.”
In Tibet, they hired truck drivers to take them across part of the vast, sweeping Chang Tang, which, at an average elevation of 4,500 metres and four times the size of Texas, is sparsely populated by nomad camps. At Mount Kailash, the holiest of mountains from where four of the world’s most significant rivers originate—the Indus, Sutlej, Brahmaputra and Karnali—they walked the kora, the 52-kilometre pilgrimage route around the mountain.
Sacred to Hindu, Buddhist, Bon and Jain religions, they shared the ritual alongside the devout, some of whom prostrated themselves for the entire distance, even over a 5,669-metre pass (nearly as high as Canada’s highest peak, Mt Logan). They cycled on teeth-rattling, rock-strewn roads and endured filthy hotels, feces-littered latrine holes and sometimes aggressively curious locals staring at the Westerners and their bikes and modern gear.
At other times, they’d roll into a Uyghur village bordered by neatly planted rows of tall poplars on both sides of the road and be welcomed into well-kept mud brick houses adorned with handsome wooden doors. (editor’s note: The Chinese government has come under scrutiny for the mass detention of more than a million Uyghurs, for forcing them into industrial-scale forced labour programmes, and for attempting to wipe out Uyghur and Islamic culture in the region through forced sterilisation of women, destruction of cultural sites, and separation of children from families.)
“When we reached Dharamsala five months after being in Lhasa, we were hit hard by news of a bloody riot that had erupted shortly after we left,” Pat recalls. “This brought home to us the vulnerability of the Tibetan people in their own country.” (Editor’s note: the genocidal atrocities committed against the Tibetans in their own country continue unabated.)
More from Pat and Baiba Morrow
This is the first photo feature from Pat. In a few week’s I’ll share one of Baiba’s diary entries from the Himalayan Passage trip, and more of Pat’s amazing images.
In the meantime you can read the book of the journey featured in this latest edition of Hard Travel. Himalayan Passage: Seven Months in the High country of Tibet, Nepal, China, India, & Pakistan by Jeremy Schmidt and Pat Morrow.
Pat’s latest book, which I mentioned earlier on, Searching For Tao Canyon was co-authored by Jeremy Schmidt and Art Twomey. The images are as good if not better than those above.
Pat also has two multi-touch ebooks for the iPad, again both with stunning imagery:
Everest: High Expectations by Pat Morrow and Sharon Wood. This richly illustrated adventure ebook tells the gripping story of two Canadian climbing expeditions that captured the attention of the mountaineering world in 1982 and 1986 — written by two climbers who reached Everest’s summit in distinctly different ways.
Heart of the Himalaya is a rich photo tribute to the people of the world’s highest mountain range by Pat and Baiba Morrow, who have travelled extensively through it for the past 33 years.
To contact Pat or Baiba head to www.patmorrow.com
In the meantime, if you’re all-in, the single most important thing you can do to show your support for Hard Travel is to share this newsletter with others who might be interested.
Thanks for reading,
Ash
You can find me on Twitter at @ashrouten or Instagram @ashrouten or contact me via www.ashrouten.com
Excellent story, great journey and sounds like nice people all around with an appreciation for different culture.
However those photos, epecially from a (semi) professional, are unnaturally over saturated (in photo editing software surely) in an effort to make them more 'clourful'.