Iceland review - 2019, Page 52

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Iceland Review
Thirty years ago, in the violent wintry swells of
the Himalayas, Kristinn Rúnarsson and Þorsteinn
Guðjónsson fell into a crevasse while ascending
Nepal’s Pumori mountain and lost their lives – or
so it was presumed. That their bodies were never
found, despite an extensive multiweek search,
became the only confirmation that they had indeed
perished some 6,600 metres (21,650 feet) above
sea level on October 18, 1988. At the time, Kristinn
Rúnarsson’s girlfriend had been five months
pregnant with their son – a boy who would go on to
live a life without his father. As the months passed,
the news of the lost climbers made its way through
Iceland's small community of mountaineers, who
were so thoroughly shaken that they put a tempo-
rary halt to their expeditions. It became less and
less likely that Kristinn and Þorsteinn were ever
going to be found.
In November of 2018, an American mountain-
eer ascending Pumori discovered the remains of
two climbers who were later identified as Kristinn
and Þorsteinn. Word spread quickly; 30 years of
agonising uncertainty dissipated with a few phone
calls and digital photographs sent across the earth
in a minute. Coincidentally, the founder of Iceland’s
largest mountaineering organisation, Icelandic
Mountain Guides, and avid climber Leifur Örn
Svavarsson happened to be in Nepal at the time
leading groups to base camp.
“I was contacted soon after the remains were
found,” Leifur explains. “Since I was already
acclimatised to the altitude, I decided to go and
retrieve them, bring them back to Kathmandu and
then eventually home to Iceland. It just made sense.
I understood so clearly that this was the closure
their families desperately needed.”
Kristinn and Þorsteinn were not alone on their
expedition in 1988; accompanying them were
two other mountaineers – Steve Aisthorpe from
Scotland and Iceland’s Jón Geirsson – both of
whom fell ill during the journey and returned to
base camp while the other two ascended to their
fate. Jón, now living in France, remembers the
sequence of events with unrelenting clarity.
“This is something that’s been haunting me
for the last thirty years. Those guys were my best
friends and amazing people. I’ve lost a number of
friends in the mountains since then, but those two
guys […] for all of us in Iceland, that was something
really hard to grapple with,” he admits.
For the small but passionate climbing commu-
nity in Iceland, news of Kristinn and Þorsteinn’s
discovery was deemed beyond incredible, for it had
seemed impossible. “It was something we never
expected would happen. And when it happened,
it was such a great relief. So many people are now
able to close this story.”
That Kristinn and Þorsteinn were among the
first Icelanders courageous enough to venture far
abroad and tackle massive mountain ranges only
added to the importance of their final quest. “No
one else was doing anything like that at the time.
Their trips into the Himalayas were way ahead
of what was happening in the Icelandic climbing
community, and they were living for that, setting an
intrepid example for others. Their loss was felt by
everyone.”
For some, a mountain is something to marvel at
from afar, or perhaps to be explored only cautiously;
for others, a mountain is something to conquer, a
symbol of the known and the unknown, urging to
be uncovered in all its tumultuousness – if not by
nature itself then by those who she deems bold
Þorsteinn and
Kristinn at the peak
of Kitaraju in Peru,
1985.