William Woodman Graham
[7] While they used the fixed ropes and iron stanchions put in place over a four-day period by Jean Joseph and Baptiste Maquignaz, who twice concluded their ascent three to four weeks before at the slightly lower Point Sella (named after their clients), Graham's party's crossing of an 'extremely awkward notch' to the higher Point Graham was marked by the British alpine community as the end of the silver age of alpinism.
[8] In 1883, shortly after he had qualified as a barrister, Graham made a visit to the Himalayas in the company of Swiss Alpine guide Josef Imboden of St. Niklaus in the canton Valais.
[9] He spent the spring trekking in the region of Kanchenjunga, but he was forced to return to Darjeeling by the cold weather and the fact that a porter had accidentally burned his boots.
Unable to penetrate the Nanda Devi Sanctuary they turned their attention towards Dunagiri, where Graham claimed to have reached a height of around 22,700 ft (6,920 m) before being forced to retreat by bad weather.
[14] Graham's confusion was partly due to the poor quality of the maps of the area, and on his return to civilisation he was critical of the Great Trigonometric Survey, suggesting that its surveyors should be trained in mountaineering by the Swiss Army, whom he credited with the finest cartographic work in the world at the time.
His ascent was doubted by members of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, whose maps of the area Graham had criticized in his June 1884 presentation at the Royal Geographical Society, and by a few contemporaries including Martin Conway and William Hunter Workman, both of whom had rival (lower) claims to the world altitude record.
[16] In a 10-page analysis in 2009, Blaser and Hughes argued that "it is time to put the doubts to rest, and give Graham, Boss and Kauffmann their due credit for an extraordinary achievement".
[1] He disappeared from mountaineering history after his year in the Himalayas and after making his initial report of his Himalayan expedition he never made any further comment or engaged in the ensuing controversy.
[18] Instead, he had soon moved to Mexico, where in October 1888 he obtained the rights to explore and exploit up to 30 mines in a 600 km2 area of Barrancas del Cobre (Copper Canyons) in Chihuahua.
