page_title: 1950 French Annapurna expedition
section_title: Leaving the mountain
hierarchical_section_title: 1950 French Annapurna expedition / Leaving the mountain
caption_attribution_description: English: Bottleneck south of Tatopani, entering from the north Deutsch: Engstelle am Kali Gandaki, Zugang von Norden
context_page_description: The 1950 French Annapurna expedition, led by Maurice Herzog, reached the summit of Annapurna I at 8,091 metres, the highest peak in the Annapurna Massif. The mountain is in Nepal and the government had given permission for the expedition, the first time it had permitted mountaineering in over a century. After failing to climb Dhaulagiri I at 8,167 metres, the higher peak nearby to the west, the team attempted Annapurna with Herzog and Louis Lachenal, reaching the summit on 3 June 1950. It was only with considerable help from their team that they were able to return alive, though with severe injuries following frostbite.
  Annapurna became the highest mountain to have been ascended to its summit, exceeding that achieved by the 1936 expedition to Nanda Devi, and the mountain was the first eight-thousander to be climbed. The feat was a great achievement for French mountaineering and caught the public imagination with front-page coverage in a best-selling issue of Paris Match. Herzog wrote a best-selling book Annapurna full of vivid descriptions of heroic endeavour and anguished suffering – but which much later was criticised for being too self-serving.
context_section_description: Specially for the expedition, All India Radio broadcast a report that the monsoon would be reaching them the next day, 10 June. The heavy rain would become torrential and the rivers would rise. A team led by Schatz built a makeshift bridge over the Miristi Kola and everyone hurried towards the bridge along paths that required Lachenal to be carried in a human cacolet and Herzog in a wicker basket. They became stranded in the open when it became too dark to carry the casualties safely. Next morning they reached a camp by the bridge but the river had risen to only 0.30 metres (1 ft) below the span so they needed to undertake the difficult crossing immediately. Everyone got across and camped for the night – by morning the bridge had been swept away. They had hoped to follow the river down to where it joined the Kali Gandaki but a reconnaissance showed this would be impossible and so they were forced to climb the Nilgiri ridge to return the way they had come. Now down in the jungle, Herzog developed a fever and reached a very low ebb: "... I implored death to come and deliver me. I had lost the will to live, and I was giving in – the ultimate humiliation ...", he wrote afterwards in his book Annapurna. The casualties could now be carried in wicker chairs made to a design of Terray and they eventually reached the Gandaki.
  Stretchers could be used on the track heading south beside the Gandaki but at Beni they took a detour because there was cholera in the area ahead.
  Oudot was having to start trimming dead flesh from Herzog's fingers using a rugine but by July he was needing to amputate as well as to continue trimming. Eventually he had to remove all of Lachenal's toes and, for Herzog, his fingers and toes. Because it was the rice planting season porters were abandoning the expedition all the time and it became impossible to find new recruits so they felt forced to adopt press gang tactics to be able to keep going. At last, on 6 July, they reached Nautanwa where they boarded a train that took them to Raxaul at the Indian border. On 6 July the climbers went on to Delhi to wait there while Herzog and a select group including two sherpas travelled to Kathmandu to be received on 11 July by the Maharajah of Nepal who greeted them as national heroes. There were a few cars in Kathmandu even though no roads led there – the vehicles had been carried in manually by hundreds of porters along the mountain trails.
caption: Kali Gandaki valley near confluence with Miristi Kola, at Tatopani. (road as in 2012).
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