‘If we don’t get off this mountain I don’t think I can do another night’: climber Fay Manners on surviving the odds | Mountaineering

Fay Manners was 6,400m up a mountain in the Indian Himalayas when she heard her climbing partner, Michelle Dvorak, scream from below. The rope attaching her to the rock face snapped tight, but held firm. Fearing something terrible had happened, Manners looked down with dread – but thankfully Dvorak was still dangling beneath her on the end of the rope.

Her relief quickly turned to horror when she realised the bag containing most of their gear, which they had been hauling on the rope behind them, had been cut loose by a falling rock and was gone. Along with it went much of their safety gear, their tent, food, stove and water.

When Dvorak climbed up to join Manners, the two looked at one another in silence. They were just a few climbing pitches away from the point at which they were going to start their final push for the summit – one of four peaks on a mountain massif described by the Himalayan Journal as an “impregnable fortress”.

Rarely climbed, Chaukhamba has claimed more than half a dozen lives, and peaks III and IV remain unconquered. Manners and Dvorak dreamed of being the first to stand at Chaukhamba III’s nearly 7,000m peak. They knew their attempt on the summit – 12 months in the making – was over. Now their only objective was survival.

Manners considered their situation. The weather was about to change. Her down trousers and sleeping bag were in the lost bag and the temperature that night was likely to sink to -15C. The two climbers needed to get off the mountain – quickly. But her crampons and ice axes were also in the lost bag. It had taken them three attempts to make it this far, and that was when they had been fully equipped. The first thing Manners remembers saying to Dvorak was: “This is going to be almost impossible for us to retreat.”

Dvorak was able to send out an SOS, but minutes later, her phone battery died. Manners’s phone was useless – the emergency comms device she needed to send any messages was in the lost bag. Descending wasn’t an option: they’d sent their location in the SOS and if they moved it would make it harder for rescuers to find them. Added to that, the weather was unfavourable, although the forecast indicated it might be better in the morning. So they were forced to stay where they were. As fog rolled in, the pair could do little more than find a narrow ledge, wrap themselves in Dvorak’s sleeping bag and huddle together for warmth. It was a long, horrific, cold night.

To their relief, rescue helicopters arrived the next morning – the two of them desperately waved their orange sleeping bag, trying to attract attention. But to no avail. They could only watch helplessly as the helicopters left.  Cold, hungry and dehydrated, they managed to collect a few drops of melting ice, and then decided to descend to a slightly lower ledge.

They looked out at a view resembling oil on canvas; swirls of ice and streaks of rock adorning jagged peaks. The weather changed again. Snow piled up on their sleeping bag as darkness fell and they entered their second night. Frost built up on their hair and clothing. Manners thought guiltily about her partner and parents, wishing she could let them know she was alive. Shivering uncontrollably and close to hypothermia, she thought: “If we don’t get off this mountain I don’t think I can do another night.”

The helicopters returned the following morning. Once again, all they could do was listen as the sound of the rotor blades eventually faded.

The pair reluctantly decided to make their way down – trying to signal the helicopters had taken precious time, then the weather had closed in the previous morning and prevented them from descending. But with hopes of rescue fading, they knew they needed to move. The abseil would be challenging, but it would not be the most dangerous part of the descent. A treacherous crevasse field awaited them at the bottom of the rock face. To make it back to base camp, Manners would have to cross it without crampons – an almost impossible task – or Dvorak would have to go alone and unroped, so that if she fell into a crevass she would be helpless. Two extremely high-risk options with potentially lethal consequences.

Miraculously, as they neared the bottom of the rock face, they spotted three climbers beneath them. Manners knew it must be a French group that they’d heard were in a different valley, planning their own attempt on the summit. She abseiled down to meet them. In her cold and dehydrated state, she imagined the group was simply passing by on their route to the top. “We’re here to rescue you,” they told her. In typically French fashion, they’d come bearing saucisson and cheese. “Then it sunk in,” says Manners. They were going to make it home. Tears of relief ran down her face.

When I speak to Manners, it’s a few weeks after her ordeal on Chaukhamba and she has had time to reflect on her experience. She’s on another climbing trip in Morocco. “It’s really warm,” she says. “The climbing is cool and adventurous, but you’re not sleeping on ledges at 6,000 metres in the cold.” Still, this will be a brief sunny interlude. She has a trip to Patagonia planned in the new year. She and Dvorak have also discussed going back to Chaukhamba next winter. Since news of her rescue made headlines around the world, many have questioned why they went there in the first place. With more than a hint of frustration, she says: “Some people don’t really understand.”

To understand, you have to go back to the beginning. “I grew up in Bedfordshire and, frankly, there aren’t many mountains around,” Manners says. As a child, she loved hockey and dreamed of playing for England, but “pretty much everyone said that can’t be your full-time job, so I thought… I can’t make a career out of sports.” Instead, she studied data science eventually and landed a job in New York.

It was a climbing gym she discovered as an antidote to working long hours that opened her eyes to the mountains and climbing. Data scientist by day, climber by night, soon she was spending her weekends snowboarding in Vermont. When she moved back to the UK, she visited north Wales and found a community of strong female climbers. “It was the first time I’d been exposed to women in that kind of sport,” she says. Climbing became an obsession.

In 2015, Manners turned freelance and moved to Chamonix in France. “I still wasn’t thinking, I’m going to make a career out of mountaineering, I just wanted to do it all the time.” Colleagues told her she was mad. Data scientists, it turns out, take a dim view of leaps into the dark. But Manners made it work, heading into the mountains whenever she could. When the ski lifts closed during the pandemic, she made her own way up the slopes. “I would walk up 3,000 metres to the top of a ski line and have this powder run all to myself.” Before long, she was tackling climbing routes that hadn’t been done in decades. “That switched my whole way of thinking,” she says. “The idea of going to places and making your own path.”

In 2021, she met Dutch climber Line van den Berg. The pair quickly became climbing partners and close friends, going on to do Phantom Direct, the longest ice route in the Mont Blanc range – they were the first women to ascend and the fourth team overall – and then the north face of the Eiger. In 2023, the Kendal Mountain Festival screened a film about them, Embracing the Grim, shot in the Scottish Highlands. In it Manners says: “It’s difficult to find a partner with the same motivation levels, to still be going, again and again. Line is the sort of person who will smile through the rain.” Van den Berg repays the compliment: “When I’m with Fay I feel much more confident in myself.”

Manners then started racking up a series of ascents as part of all-female teams. Those achievements culminated in March 2023 when, with Swedish alpinist Freja Shannon, she claimed a new 250m mixed rock-and-ice route on the rugged crags of Senja island, in Norway – her debut first ascent. A few months earlier, mountaineering had become her full-time profession. Not long after returning from Norway, sponsor North Face flew her to Pakistan for an expedition.

Pakistan was a struggle. Manners fell ill and was stuck in camp for eight days. On her first day venturing out, she helped establish another first ascent, before heading back to camp and crashing out in her tent. But then things got much worse. She was woken by the beep of a brief, stark message on her emergency phone: “Line and her friends have all died in a climbing accident. It is still not clear what happened, but it seems they got caught in an avalanche.”

Manners was devastated. She thought about heading home. Her expedition partners offered support and sympathy; they’d lost people in the mountains, too. In the end, she stayed. They named their new route Dommage pas de Fromage, a phrase of Line’s creation: Too bad, no cheese. “She just loved it and really wanted it to be a big thing everyone would say,” says Manners, who saw it as a tribute to the first ascent they’d spoken about but never got the chance to do together. “I was just expecting that I would return home and see her again,” she says. “It didn’t cross my mind that something could happen while I was away.”

Manners went on to make several more first ascents. With Michelle Dvorak, an American climber she’d met in Chamonix and gone on to forge a strong partnership through mutual friends, she travelled to Greenland and established two new rock-climbing routes. The two discussed attempting something even bigger. Manners recalls: “We wanted to go and do a first ascent that would become a classic.”

They began researching unconquered Himalayan peaks, discovering two on the Chaukhamba massif. And so, in September, Manners and Dvorak arrived in India to make their attempt. The crevasse field was more challenging to pass than they’d imagined. After two failed attempts and an exhausting two days, they succeeded on the third try. From there they started up the granite spire.

Some pitches were highly technical, while others were easier to climb, but the holds were loose. The prospect of falling while wearing a 15kg rucksack was not appealing. Nearing the top of the spire, Manners took the lead on a solid-looking line, putting heavy gear into a bag to be pulled up behind her. At the top of the pitch, she started to haul, while Dvorak climbed.

That was when she heard her partner scream.

For 80 hours after the accident, it wasn’t clear that Manners and Dvorak would make it off the mountain. The Times of India reported “rescue teams battling against difficult weather conditions and treacherous terrain”. Manners understands why the story was so compelling: “There’s so many people who go through this situation and don’t come out of it.” But it’s also hard for her to be defined by this one incident. “I’ve succeeded in a lot of different aspects of mountaineering,” she says. “To go through this experience and that to be the thing that’s in the media about me? It feels really difficult.”

Manners remains grateful to those involved in her rescue: the French mountaineers and the Indian military who later airlifted them to safety. But it has sometimes seemed that the role the women played in their own survival has been overlooked. Those stories skipped over the skill and experience required to survive at high altitude when things go wrong. Sometimes, success means reaching a summit. Other times it means going part way up a mountain and making it back down safely.

I ask Manners how she, as a recovering data scientist turned mountaineer, thinks about risk. “I really try to control the risks,” she says. “I try to do things that are outside my comfort zone, but within my ability to control my safety.” Can you ever truly control your safety in mountaineering? “I think all athletes will say they feel they are not taking too much risk. There are always things that are very slightly outside your control.”

In mountaineering, your data is always incomplete – and never more so when tackling first ascents. “But that’s the draw and the beauty of doing something so unknownand that hasn’t been done before,” says Manners. “You have to be able to adapt.” Sometimes, you also have to suffer.

That’s something Line would have reminded her. “She’d always be like: ‘Yeah, but Fay, we wanted this!’” To be out in the mountains, the hardship is both part of the point and a price worth paying. “There are so many special moments that you wouldn’t get without a bit of suffering.”