TREKKING up mountains and making adventure films are not for the faint-hearted, but photojournalist Marianne Schwankhart is completely up to the challenge. Schwankhart, a photojournalist with The Times newspaper, visited the Bay last week as a guest speaker of the Mountain Club of South Africa’s Port Elizabeth branch.

Schwankhart discussed her experiences of climbing the extremely steep Trango Tower in Pakistan a few years ago.

It took Schwankhart and her fellow climbers, Peter Lazarus, James Pitman and Andreas Kiefer, three weeks to summit the tower which, at the time of their climb, had eight different possible routes to the summit.

The South African team climbed the Slovenian route.

The Trango Tower, which has an altitude of 6250 metres and is 1200 metres high from its base, lies on the Boltoro Glacier in the Karakoram mountain range of Pakistan.

Also known as the Nameless Tower, it first attracted the attention of legendary English climber Joe Brown during an expedition to central Karakoram in 1956.

Schwankhart, who received her primary school education in Plettenberg Bay, finished high school in Johannesburg and did a fine arts degree at Wits Technikon, was bitten by the mountaineering bug in 1995.

“I joined a mountain climbing club at Technikon as a way to go out less with my parents,” she quipped.

She moved to England in 1998 and climbed mountains there and in other parts of Europe. In 1999 she also climbed extensively in the US.

“I like nature,” Schwankhart said simply. “My parents always took me and my sister hiking.”

She described climbing in Pakistan as “a hell of a mission”.

“There was a lot of military activity then and we had to arrange with the tourism company for guides and cooks to accommodate us where we had set up base camp. Our guides and cooks were people who really had nothing. They walked, wearing plastic shoes without socks, to our base camp,” said Schwankhart.

While climbing in Pakistan she and the rest of her team regularly emailed articles and photos back home by means of satellite equipment. “We had a satellite phone to call our families and friends.

“Snowstorms almost forced us to abandon the climb just metres from the top on the day of the summit,” she said.

At one point the team slept in portaledges – special hammocks that were set up on the shoulder of the mountain.

Another night they had to sleep sitting upright with their feet dangling over a steep edge.

The many obstacles they faced included having to “ice-climb an overhanging snow mushroom which was collapsing” under their attempts.

“We met other teams – some very hard-core US climbers, a Korean team and a German couple who did not get very far.”

Before the Koreans descended they shared their food and gas with Schwankhart and her fellow climbers.

After their summit the South Africans received a big welcome from the guides and support staff who’d stayed behind to wait for them at their base camp.

Their timing for the trip was extremely fortuitous as “two weeks after we’d left there was a huge earthquake in Pakistan”.

Schwankhart joined light aircraft enthusiast James Pitman – who’d also taken part in the Trango Tower expedition – as well as Mike Blyth to make an adventure film, No Need for Parking.

This film documented the trio’s various flying and rock climbing exploits around Southern Africa.

Among the climbs she has undertaken elsewhere in the world, the Cerro Torre in the Parque Nacional Los Glaciares in the Patagonia region of Argentina particularly stands out.

Characterised by difficult technical climbs and foul weather, the Cerro Torre is considered one of the world’s most coveted peaks to conquer – but Schwankhart managed this in 2005.

South America lured her back last year, when she climbed all three of the Torres del Paine or “Towers of Pain” in Chile’s magnificent Torres del Paine National Park.