Most climbers find their way into the sport through a love of mountains, the lure of a personal challenge or the enjoyment of the gymnastic skills needed to master movement on steep terrain. They start with perhaps some family camping trips, bushwalking with school or outdoor groups or scrambling on steep rocks with a few friends. Then, with some inspiration from local climbers or Bonington mountaineering books, they move on to technical rock climbing and alpine climbing. Pat Cullinan’s entry into mountaineering, on the other hand, was the most unusual of any of Australia’s Himalayan climbers. He was, almost literally, ordered to climb. A member of the Special Air Service (SAS), Cullinan was sent to Perth and made ‘Climbing Troop Commander’. The members of each SAS unit, in addition to mastering all of the usual military skills, must learn a ‘specialist skill’, and in the case of Cullinan’s troop, climbing was that skill. The year of Cullinan’s posting was 1975—that critical year during which so much of Australian Himalayan climbing had its start.Although Cullinan had done no climbing before he was assigned to the Perth SAS unit, he was not uninitiated in outdoor pursuits. Before his move to Perth, he had done some bushwalking in the Snowy Mountains region of New South Wales and in 1976 made the classic trek to Everest base camp. Cullinan’s climbing career began in the course of duty, with rock-climbing instruction at Mt Arapiles in western Victoria followed with excursions to the crags of the Stirling Range south-east of Perth. By the late 1970s, Cullinan thought his SAS troops, to fully develop their skills as climbing specialists, needed a more challenging objective further afield. The next advance for most Australian climbers at this stage of their careers is a trip to New Zealand, where they take an introductory course in alpine climbing and then hone their new skills on some of the more straightforward mountains in the Southern Alps. A few do go directly to the Himalaya without New Zealand experience under their belts, but they invariably confine a first trip to one of the lower, less-demanding of the ‘trekking peaks’ or an equivalent. Cullinan, however, had something vastly different in mind for his troops. He not only bypassed New Zealand, he led them in 1980 straight to Nepal—in fact, to a high, unclimbed, difficult Himalayan peak. Their mountain was Gauri Shankar, an impressive peak rising precipitously from the remote Rolwaling Valley in eastern Nepal. At 7150 m, it is slightly higher than Dunagiri—the objective of the ANU Mountaineering Club (ANUMC) expedition two years earlier—and is even more difficult technically. In fact, only the northern summit of Gauri Shankar’s complex upper structure had been climbed, and that by a strong and experienced American team in 1979. Cullinan’s audacious plan was to climb to the main southern summit via the 5 km-long South-East Ridge, replete with ice towers, rock gendarmes and double cornices—in short, a climbing nightmare. In attempting this route to an unclimbed Himalayan summit more than 7000 m high, the group of raw climbing recruits from hot, flat Western Australia was very much out of their depth. Cullinan and his colleagues quickly realised that they did not have the experience, skill, time or equipment to climb Gauri Shankar. Their planned approach to the South-East Ridge would, however, take them near a subsidiary summit, Tseringma. At 6333 m, Tseringma offered some interesting climbing and, as it was an unclimbed summit, was a particularly attractive target for a team on their first expedition to the Himalaya.