One British family produced two legendary climbers whose summitted mountains in the Alps and the Himalayas. This is their story.
Amid a soundscape of falling rock and ice, Alison Hargreaves settled down for a second sleepless night on the 6,000-foot north face of Switzerland’s Eiger, at the Death Bivouac. Two men had frozen to death here during the first attempt to climb the face in 1935. Fatigued and nauseous, she rested her aching body on a coffin-sized ledge. Alison wasn’t suffering from altitude sickness: she was six months pregnant.
High on the imposing Mordwand – ‘murderous wall’ – which had claimed the lives of so many men, Alison carried a new life, which kicked and jostled against the squeeze of her harness. On reaching the summit, she became the first British woman to ascend the mountain’s north face.
Alison’s unborn child entered the world as Tom Ballard and lived as his mother had lived, following in her hand-and-footholds, becoming a world-class alpinist and intermittently catching the public eye over 30 years.
At the centre of the family is the husband and father, Jim Ballard. Their story involves a complex interplay of control, escape, freedom, choice, expectation and blame. There’s also the question of how it has been told – and by whom.
‘There are,’ Alison once remarked, ‘far more mountains out there to climb than just the physical ones.’
Long before Alison wrote history on the Eiger’s north face, she dreamt of climbing it. Born in 1962 to middle-class, outdoor-loving parents, Alison documented her childhood hillwalks in her diary.
Growing up in the Peak District, the heart of the UK climbing scene, Alison progressed quickly. At 16, she craved independence from her parents. They found her a job at a climbing shop owned by an acquaintance: Jim Ballard. The shop was a hub for famous climbers and the counterculture lifestyle of this male-dominated clique – who lived on the dole and prioritised climbing – thrilled Alison. She swapped homework for climbing.
Jim styled himself as a straight-talking, working-class Yorkshireman. His blunt jokes made Alison laugh. He was his own boss with the money and freedom to climb, which appealed to Alison. Weeks after Alison started work, Jim took her climbing, ending in late nights at the pub. Alison was 16, Jim twice her age.
The day after Alison’s 18th birthday, she told her parents that she was moving in with recently divorced Jim. ‘I’m not trying to escape from the family for good, just becoming the independent person I feel I need to be,’ she wrote home.
Jim supported Alison’s talent while she worked for him and set up her own equipment manufacturing enterprise – but if her parents’ well-meaning expectations were high, Jim’s expectations of her in climbing, business and domestic life were higher still.
Although Jim held court at the shop, he struggled with bouts of agoraphobia. By the summer of 1982, Alison’s youthful exuberance was tempered by the couple’s growing isolation in a newly purchased cottage.
Alison noted: ‘An enormous row and fite [sic]. Frightened when kicked… Upset, cos JB said I didn’t look after him.’
While Alison confided in her diary and struggled to find her voice, Jim waxed lyrical about her achievements, selling her ability to potential sponsors and the climbing media. This sparked pressure to succeed from Jim, others – and Alison herself.
While climbing, Alison felt a sense of control and freedom that eluded her at home. She discovered an affinity for Alpine and high-altitude climbing, garnering publicity as one of few female mountaineers. Alison wrote that Jim initially tried to prevent her trips abroad due to her business responsibilities and the cost, insisting that she pay her way.
A chance meeting at a trade show secured Alison her first Himalayan expedition in 1986, part-funded by her parents. With a team of accomplished American men, Alison made the first ascent of the north-west face of Kangtega in Nepal. Her pivot to the Himalayas was ‘typical of both her fierce determination to achieve and the pressure and conflicts of her relationship with Jim,’ biographers Ed Douglas and David Rose wrote. Jim appeared once again vicariously ambitious and ‘swept up in her sudden entry to the big time.’
As Alison’s confidence developed through expeditions, she became more assertive on the page, writing that ‘[Jim] should ‘get stuffed, show me some respect’. She considered separation: ‘I need some independence – to do and create something, achieve something myself.’
But her travels distanced Alison from domestic problems; she romanticised home comforts. In 1987, a deadly storm on Ama Dablam in Nepal killed several climbers and ended her attempt. Contemplating life’s fragility and seeking purpose, Alison considered starting a family.
By 1988, Alison was pregnant and the couple married. Late in her second trimester, she climbed the Eiger north face. She wrote to Jim: ‘I hope our sprog is OK, I’m trying to look after it.’ Friends named a route in Derbyshire ‘Foetus on the Eiger’ to commemorate the ascent. Three months later, while climbing close to home, Alison felt the twinges of labour.
As a young mum, Alison bore most parental responsibilities while Jim plunged into business debts and depression. She snatched opportunities to climb locally and abroad, often solo. But she also missed Tom, who stayed at home with Jim. Despite doubting her marriage, Alison wanted another child. She wrote a letter to Jim to convince him: ‘I know pressures on you are greater than ever before. But please don’t ignore me and put it off until another better time – cos it won’t be.’ Kate Ballard was born in 1991.
With another child to support, Alison embarked on a professional climbing career under Jim’s management. In the 1990s, mountaineers typically funded expeditions through brand endorsements, books, films, public speaking and guiding work. Alison’s career-launching goal was to become the first person to climb the six north faces of the Alps in one season, in the summer of 1993. She attracted a book advance for £3,000 from Hodder & Stoughton and a three-year retainer from equipment company Sprayway for £600 per month. The couple rented out their cottage, abandoned the business and drove to Europe.
Alison was now the breadwinner, while Jim child-minded at campsites. Marital tensions grew in confinement and Alison felt pressure to succeed. When she finished her project, some climbers were sceptical: Alison had taken a less challenging route on the north-east face of the Eiger and an easier line on the Grandes Jorasses. In her book A Hard Day’s Summer, Jim suggested that she had forged a new route on the Eiger, which her biographers described as inaccurate ‘triumphalism’. Clumsy sponsorship plugs added to its PR failure.
Back home, the financial situation worsened: the house was repossessed and Jim’s business liquidated. Alison’s parents – who had contributed to mortgage payments – collected the Ballards’ belongings, including Alison’s diaries.
One mountain could change Alison’s life. Everest had not yet been climbed by a British woman. Alison planned a 1994 expedition. When British journalist and novice mountaineer Rebecca Stephens announced a 1993 attempt, Alison wanted to climb earlier, but Jim refused. When Stephens summited, Alison was deflated. Although Stephens had used Sherpas, bottled oxygen and fixed ropes, her ascent – along with becoming the first British woman to complete the Seven Summits in 1994 – earned her a lucrative TV presenting career and an MBE.
There was, however, another headline-grabbing Everest feat within Alison’s reach: becoming the first British woman to climb Everest without bottled oxygen. A medical research expedition offered her a place for $10,000. Alison lived at Base Camp with Jim and the children for three months, but failed at 8,400m – just 400m from the summit – due to stormy weather, angering Jim. Afterwards, the couple lived apart while Alison told friends she wanted to split from Jim.
Alison returned to Everest in 1995, funded by her wealthy new manager: Richard Allen, a climber and general manager at construction firm Keir. Allen arranged a £15,000 book advance with London publisher Jonathan Cape. Her new goal was to become the first to summit the three highest mountains solo, unsupported and without supplementary oxygen in the same year: Everest, K2 and Kangchenjunga. ‘If I can get all three in the bag, it would give me some financial security,’ she told a friend. ‘I can settle down to life with the children, do some lectures.’
She climbed Everest solo, unsupported and without bottled oxygen, becoming the first woman – and only the second person, after legendary Italian climber Reinhold Messner – to do so. From the summit, Alison radioed: ‘To Tom and Kate, I am on the highest point in the world and I love you dearly.’ The Times hailed her ‘Alison of Everest.’
Alison’s friend, Ed Douglas, saw her at Base Camp. ‘She was transformed,’ he said. ‘She seemed bigger, literally, physically bigger. She was really upbeat, in her element.’
In the meantime, Jim had scrambled a PR committee with two friends to bypass Alison’s manager. Photographers hounded her at Heathrow. At a packed press conference, the couple sat apart. Jim claimed her ascent ‘was the most important climb ever undertaken by a woman in the history of mountaineering’ – unnecessary hype that embarrassed Alison. Her manager renegotiated the book deal to £30,000, with the prospect of more money if she progressed on K2. Before she departed, Alison bought a cottage below Ben Nevis, envisioning returning as a single parent.
The 1990s marked the start of a new list-ticking attention economy in mountaineering – including climbing the Seven Summits, or all 14 eight-thousanders after Messner’s 1986 precedent. ‘Alison was caught up in that changing world,’ Douglas said. ‘You can get attention as a climber in some really unhealthy ways. But it’s not a fucking game – people die.’
In a candid interview recorded at K2 Base Camp and published in the Independent, Alison expressed her disillusionment with the focus on collecting famous peaks over pioneering lines on unclimbed ones: ‘It means something to the general public. It means sponsors. It means you can get the money.’
‘I’m so pissed off with the way things are going in climbing,’ she said, citing competitiveness and dishonesty. ‘I’m not sure whether I’ll continue to be a 100 per cent professional climber.’
Three months after standing on top of the world, Alison agonised alone in her tent. She had refused to join Briton Alan Hinkes on his successful attempt, missing an opportunity. ‘It eats away at me – wanting the children and wanting K2,’ she wrote. ‘Maybe they’d be happier if mum was around but maybe summiting K2 would help make a better future for them. Long term, having me back safe and sound is surely more important.’
On 13 August, Alison climbed high as clouds unfurled on the horizon and polar winds circled. Two climbers retreated, but others continued: ‘I’m going up,’ Alison said. From the summit, another climber reported fine weather. But shortly after reaching the top, a storm with gusts of around 140mph ripped Alison off the mountain. Seven died in total. Her body was never recovered.
Alison’s final diary entry – titled ‘Thursday 10 August’ and underlined in expectation – was never written. The media took over her narrative, filling the blank space. Peter Hillary – son of Everest’s first ascensionist Edmund Hillary – who aborted his climb, told the Independent that a stubborn ‘summit fever’ had driven Alison’s group.
‘K2 is Not for Mothers,’ read the Sunday Times. Columnists Polly Toynbee and Nigella Lawson – unaware of Alison’s domestic turmoil – lambasted her mother-mountaineer duality. Toynbee wrote: ‘What is interesting about Alison Hargreaves is that she behaved like a man. She put danger first and her family a poor second.’
In an interview, Alison once said: ‘The children become number one in my head… I can’t turn off unless I know they’re safe to get on with my job, which in my case is climbing mountains.’ The criticism highlighted a sexist double standard: male father-mountaineers were rarely shamed, dead or alive.
Alison was pragmatic about danger, relying on a confirmation bias that she could avoid it. ‘She was fearless about climbing a mountain because she knew it was a fear she could control,’ Alison’s mother Joyce once said. ‘But she hated the fear she felt about her marriage problems, because it was out of her control.’
After Alison’s death, her parents gave Ed Douglas and David Rose her diaries, excerpts of which were published in their biography Regions of the Heart, some detailing physical and emotional abuse.
‘I have had no contact with Jim Ballard since he wouldn’t answer the allegations we put to him and subsequently published in Regions of the Heart and the Mail on Sunday,’ Douglas said. ‘The number of assaults Alison suffered was small. It was the day-to-day pressure on her from Jim’s controlling nature that had the biggest effect.’
Since the publication of Regions, storytellers have avoided mentions of domestic violence. Jennifer Jordan, author of Savage Summit about women on K2, omitted the allegations, citing a stultifying climate of silence.
‘We spent time with lawyers defending our version of events and both of us absolutely stand by it,’ Douglas said. ‘Not telling the truth would have been a disservice to Alison’s story.’
The real tragedy, Douglas believes, was the fact that Alison was taking back control of her life prior to her death – for her children’s sake.
When six-year-old Tom Ballard was told of his mother’s death, he carried a photo of Alison on the summit of Everest to bed because he liked ‘talking to her’. Soon after, he asked Jim whether he could see her ‘last mountain’.
Five weeks later in Pakistan, in a tent on a ten-day trek to K2, Tom was asked to ‘draw something sad’ in a grief-counselling book. With determined, heavy-handed strokes, he scrawled a pyramid with figures representing his mother’s body and himself in tears. The camera lingered as Tom started crying.
Alison’s Last Mountain (1996), directed by Chris Terrill, retraced Alison’s footsteps to K2 with the family. In what Terrill calls ‘a strange coming together of destinies’, Alison had invited him to film her expedition, but he opened the letter too late. Instead, he documented her family’s pilgrimage to her grave, interspersed with recovered footage of her last climb.
Terrill met the family on the trek and bonded, having recently lost his niece. ‘We were in this mutual grieving process,’ he said. ‘Jim felt it important for the kids to feel that they had some closure, particularly as grief can endure. Would it haunt them in later life?’
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Before the trek, media outlets had sent psychologists to assess Jim’s lack of emotion. ‘I don’t think you should be sad at people’s death, particularly if you’re as lucky as Alison – very few people are able to die at their crowning glory,’ he explained in the film, adding that illness or old age is ‘no way for a restless spirit like Alison to die’.
Scenes depict Jim comforting the children – and himself – with the belief that Alison’s spirit lives on in the mountains. He pointed to an ‘angel’s wings’-shaped cloud guarding K2’s summit. ‘Is that mummy?’ Kate asked.
While Kate has little recollection of Alison or the trek, Tom was deeply affected by the expedition. Instead of providing closure, it opened his eyes wider to Alison’s mountaineering passion. ‘It would be an awfully hard act to follow, as a boy, to follow the greatest woman climber, and even more impossible for Kate,’ Jim said. ‘But who knows.’
Terrill remembers a ‘vocal fraternity’ condemning the project. ‘Was it a dangerous stunt?’ they asked. Jim received sponsorships for the trek and wrote an accompanying BBC book, One and Two Halves to K2. Douglas believes that the children were ‘used to leverage funds’ through media coverage.
‘Mountaineers are deeply bonded like soldiers,’ Terrill said. ‘Very supportive of each other, but with an ingrained sense of competition and people wanted to put Jim down for all sorts of reasons.’
Although Terrill has discussed the domestic abuse allegations with Jim, he did not address them in his films. Alison’s Last Mountain predates the publication of Regions of the Heart, but he consciously omitted the subject. ‘That’s between him and me,’ he said. ‘I never needed it to inform the stories I was telling. People want to expose him, rightly or wrongly, for either a mental or physical abuser of Alison. Regions of the Heart was a despicable attempt to cash in, I guess, on this very nuanced human story. I was interested in Tom and Kate in the present tense and their own hopes and dreams.’
Between 1995 and 2018, Terrill followed the family’s adventures in Fort William and beyond. He envisaged a long-term project. From a young age, Tom voiced a desire to climb K2 in memory of his mother, solo and without oxygen. From age 14, Tom attended school erratically and climbed voraciously, producing a guidebook to local rocks.
In 2009, the Ballards moved to Alpiglen, Switzerland, in the shadow of the Eiger. Like Alison, Tom gravitated towards alpine climbing, combining an appreciation of tradition with his modern-day athleticism, technical skill and vision. Tom climbed a new route on the north face, named Seven Pillars of Wisdom after his favourite book by T.E. Lawrence. He lived by the quote: ‘All men dream: but not equally.’ Tom also mostly climbed solo – a consequence of his introverted nature.
But so far, his achievements were limited to cliffs and 4,000m peaks. He had not ventured to the 8,000m mountains of the Himalaya.
In 2010, articles outlined 22-year-old Tom’s desire to solo K2 in winter – a dangerous and unprecedented feat – drawing parallels between his mother’s death and his ambition. In response, Douglas and Rose published a story in the Daily Mail with unrevealed allegations against Jim from Alison’s diaries, alongside comments from mountaineers condemning Tom’s plans. ‘The project was cooked up for a media wheeze,’ Douglas said. ‘The BBC were interested. After our story, I expect that there were conversations within the BBC that this wasn’t sensible.’
Terrill denies that the climb was imminent. He spoke to the BBC about a potential documentary as he needed to film Tom until he was ready, but they would not commission a project with an indeterminate timeframe. The Ballards were courting sponsorship for a future expedition, Terrill believes. ‘The press jumped on it, some outlets deciding it was to be an upcoming climb,’ he said. ‘It was based on rumour and some nasty attempts to – I think – undermine not Tom, but Jim.’
From 2012, father and son travelled the Alps in a van, supported by Jim’s pension and Tom’s limited sponsorships. Jim fashioned homemade pitons and Tom used Alison’s ice axes, stored in barrels from her K2 expedition.
In 2015, Tom mirrored his mother’s 1993 six Alpine solos, but increased the challenge, undertaking them in winter. Just as Jim had chauffeured Alison, he now drove Tom between objectives. The project was featured in the documentary TOM by Angel Esteban and Elena Goatelli. Tom resembled Alison, bearing similarly high, weathered cheekbones. Strawberry-blonde hair emphasised glacier-blue eyes. He spoke in an implacable, Italian-inflected lilt moulded by the mountains.
‘Of course my mum is part of the history of the six north faces, and it’s quite important for me, but it’s not the reason why,’ he said in TOM. ‘The reason I’m climbing the six north faces is not for anybody else. It’s only for me. But I guess there’s a lot more than that which I can’t explain because I don’t obviously understand.’ Like Alison, Tom struggled to articulate emotions. But while Alison was outgoing, Tom was reserved and deeply introspective.
In TOM, Jim said of their itinerant, insular set-up: ‘We’re a bit like an Alpine snail… our entire life is us.’ Tom had, however, met an Italian girlfriend, Steffi. Tom echoed Alison, describing climbing being ‘an escape from normal life’, while returning to civilisation is ‘not really an escape anymore’.
On his first climb, he suffered frostbite. Then, while descending the Eiger, he encountered a dead body, just as Alison had. Tom became the first person to solo all six north faces in winter. Jim fixated on mainstream publicity. ‘I think Tom’s abilities have finally registered on a wider scale,’ he said, mentioning the Sunday Times, Radio 4 and ‘interest from Hollywood’.
Like Alison, Tom was overwhelmed by the spotlight. ‘I had a lot of press attention to deal with, this was harder than the climbing!’ he told a sponsor. ‘It is time to take my skills to bigger, more remote mountains. Climbing fast and light on big, technical routes. Of course there is one mountain, K2, which is intrinsic to my own personal history.’ An interview in the Times cited sponsorship needs for a Gasherbrum IV expedition, a peak in Pakistan considered harder than K2.
In 2017, Tom and Kate made another pilgrimage to K2. Afterwards, Tom attempted nearby peak Link Sar with Italian mountaineer Daniele Nardi. The pair failed, but bonded. In an expedition report, Tom’s humour, intellect – and high-risk tolerance – shone. He described surviving falling ice ‘by a whisker’ and dodging avalanches (‘We pay them little heed, just another avalanche!’) before quoting from Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade.
The following year, Tom was invited to climb K2 with a Spanish team, but he declined as he was not ready and did not want to join a large expedition.
Nardi was obsessed with making the first ascent of the Mummery Spur on Pakistan’s Nanga Parbat – the ‘Killer Mountain’ – and in winter, having made four attempts. Despite Tom’s lack of high-altitude experience, Nardi invited him to return in 2019. Nardi aimed to carry the flag of a non-profit managed by the Church of Scientology to the summit. Snow and ice cascaded around them. Temperatures plunged to -40C as winds blasted up to 200mph. Tom’s girlfriend Steffi begged him to descend, fearing he had become embroiled in Nardi’s ambition. ‘Is my job. If u don’t like it leave me,’ he messaged. Soon, contact was lost.
Two weeks later, their bodies were located – by the same Spanish team who had invited Tom to K2. While the exact circumstances are unknown, it appeared that they were descending, possibly having summited. Their bodies remain on Nanga Parbat.
Nardi left behind a six-month-old son. Tom died as his mother had, in the same mountain range, in similar circumstances, in his early 30s – on the ‘Savage Mountain’ and the ‘Killer Mountain’, 24 years and 100 miles apart.
‘One is wearing orange, one is wearing blue – they can’t be a 100 per cent sure, but they’re not moving,’ Kate told Jim via phone in a scene from The Last Mountain. A camera lingered as he calmly said ‘OK, dear, OK. So how are you bearing up with that?’ Kate sobs down the line, refusing to believe Tom is dead. The scene cuts to a panning shot of the siblings on a summit.
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Off-camera, Terrill witnessed Jim’s cold veneer crack. ‘I can’t believe this has happened for the second time,’ he said. The pair embraced silently. ‘If Jim wants to tell you something, he will,’ Chris said. ‘Otherwise, he’ll be protective of himself, and particularly of his children.’
With Tom’s death, Terrill’s ‘Children of the Mountains’ project had an unexpected ending. The outcome – The Last Mountain – connects Alison’s legacy as a mountaineering matriarch with Tom’s career, mixing footage of his last climb with Kate’s trek to Nanga Parbat to see where he died.
Terrill considered creating a tribute to Tom. ‘I think it’s the film that Jim would have liked,’ he said. ‘But Tom was coming to terms with his destiny as an alpinist and this more personal film was too compelling a story not to tell.’
An anthropologist, Terrill immerses himself in the lives of his subjects. He acknowledges that his closeness to the Ballards blurs lines. Terrill questioned his decision to keep rolling: ‘What are the ethical boundaries, not just as a filmmaker, but as a friend of the family?’
The trio debated the cut, which was not initially ‘well-received’, although Terrill had final sign-off. ‘It was about coming to terms with the realities of the film that celebrated Tom, but put that into context emotionally,’ Terrill said. ‘Mountains were the arena, but the story’s about family, motherhood, fatherhood, siblingship and grief.’
In Starlight and Storm, a book that inspired Alison and Tom’s north face projects, French alpinist Gaston Rébuffat wrote that a climber’s fate depends on the stars. ‘If they shine too brightly he is filled with doubt, for a storm is on the way.’ Both mother and son paid the ultimate price for their brilliance amid a perfect storm of personal and public trauma.
Just as Jim was protective of Tom, Tom in turn defended his father. He rejected allegations against Jim in a 2015 GQ interview:
‘If you are looking for someone to blame for my mum’s death, my father is the obvious candidate. When somebody dies tragically, we always look for someone to blame. The trouble is, you can’t blame it on the mountain.’
Douglas disagrees that the biography casts blame on Jim. ‘No, I don’t think we did that,’ he said. ‘Human relationships are complicated, but Alison made the decision to climb, people die in the mountains. That’s the way it is. It always will be.’
