Four Miles High

Four Miles High was originally published in 1966 by Victor Gollancz. In 2021 the Pinnacle Club, a UK wide women’s climbing club, is observing its centenary year and as part of their celebrations the club is publishing this new edition of Jo Scarr’s book, with colour photographs and some additions to bring the story up to the present.

Four Miles High tells two stories of Himalayan climbing. In 1961 two young Pinnacle Club members, Josephine Scarr and Barbara Spark, formed the Women’s Kulu Expedition and drove overland to India where they hired Ladakhi porters and mapped a previously untrodden, unexplored glacier in the Kulu district (now Kullu) and achieved first ascents of two 6,000 m peaks.

After teaching in a school in Delhi over the winter, in 1962 the pair joined four other members of the Pinnacle Club for the all-women British Jagdula Expedition to explore, map and climb in the remote Kanjiroba Himal in North-Western Nepal. The leader was Dorothea Gravina and the other team members were Denise Evans, Nancy Smith and Pat Wood.
The second expedition was as successful as the Kullu one, climbing Lha Shamma (6,412 m) and six other virgin peaks.

The book is full of wonderful details of learning snow and ice climbing, getting sponsorship, packing, travelling and hiring porters, ponies or yaks, their camps, acclimatisation, the locals they met and much more.