More commonly, however, the Polar Jet does not go upwards, it veers either left or right to howl across the West Face and then spills over the lower shoulders of the Wheel to the north or south. There, it rips across the ridgeline as a shrieking gale that makes such exposed positions too deadly to stand or even crouch upon, let alone climb.
In all these cases, the lower slopes of the mountain are left almost unscathed. But sometimes, when the winds strike the Wheel at just the right angle, the Polar Jet is diverted not upwards or left or right, but straight downwards, pouring down the West Face like an invisible avalanche.
To climbers caught on the Face in such a situation, a comfortable ascent in calm air can turn, in the space of minutes, to a nightmare fight for life in a hurricane gale that is trying to blow them off the mountain. Indeed, until the installation, during the Richman expedition, of Doppler wind-detecting radar upon the nearby Observatory Mount, which can give climbers at least a few minutes’ warning of descending gales, these surprise downdrafts were the leading cause of disaster upon the Wheel.
But the deadliest zone created by diverted jet-stream winds does not, in fact, lie on the slopes of the Wheel at all, but instead westward and out to sea. This unfortunate position happens to be the peak of the aforementioned Observatory Mount.
The explanation is this. If the Wheel was an actual wall, perfectly flat both vertically and horizontally, then the diverted winds would simply stream down to the base to batter against the sea. But of course the Wheel is actually a slope, which means that the winds flow down at an angle and are thrust westwards across the sea once they reach the bottom. Towards Observatory Mount.
More importantly, on its north–south axis the Wheel forms a vast curving arc, the mouth of which faces to the west. So, as the winds push out from along its forty-five-kilometre shore, they are also directed, because of the curve of that shore, to converge towards a central point. This convergence and crowding together of winds results in a huge acceleration and amplification of wind speeds within an increasingly narrow lane of air. And that lane aligns perfectly with the peak of Observatory Mount.
Indeed, if certain weather conditions are prevailing in the lower atmosphere around the Wheel, then, on rare occasions, the falling downdrafts can be accelerated far beyond their original velocities. Remember, jet-stream winds can easily reach two or three hundred kilometres per hour, which is bad enough, but at the focal point of Observatory Mount hyper-magnified winds have been measured at sustained speeds of nearly five hundred kilometres per hour, with gusts reaching even higher.
The single strongest gust of wind ever recorded anywhere on Earth, by direct measurement of a properly calibrated and properly functioning anemometer, was caught in August 1984 at the weather station then emplaced atop Observatory Mount. It clocked in at an astonishing five hundred and twenty-eight kilometres per hour.
This is terrifying stuff. It is likely that winds within severe tornados do reach similar speeds, though such measurements have been made only indirectly. But in any case, a tornado is soon come and gone. Atop
Observatory Mount, steady gales in excess of four hundred kilometres per hour have been known to blow without let for hours. In the wind stakes, thus, the Wheel rules horrifyingly supreme.
But perhaps it is best to let some examples from the history of the mountain speak as evidence.
In 1965, fewer than ten years before Walter Richman’s expedition finally made it to the summit, its climbers protected by their high-altitude suits and huts, an expedition was mounted by a French team under the auspices of the legendary Maurice Herzog, who in the 1950s had led the first team to summit a peak above eight thousand metres in the Himalayas. Having lost most of his toes and fingers to frostbite on that occasion, Herzog was not one of the climbers in the 1965 attempt upon the Wheel. But it was his name, and his then position of French Minister for Sport, that helped raise the funds and equipment necessary for a serious attempt upon the mountain.
Although the equipment was as advanced as the times allowed, it was considerably inferior to that available to the later Richman expedition. Nor were the logistics of the Herzog attempt anywhere near as vast as those of Richman’s. The French, for instance, did not have the capacity to run electricity and water to their higher camps. For this and other reasons the attempt was most likely destined to fail, even if conditions on the mountain had been friendly.
Conditions were not friendly. In fact, the weather was uniformly bad. Meanwhile, neither the pressure suits nor the habitats functioned as well as hoped, and supply lines up the mountain proved all but impossible to maintain. In the end, the expedition topped out at only twelve thousand two hundred metres. This was the highest that anyone had climbed to that point in history, and indeed it was the first time that climbers had penetrated, if only just, into the stratosphere. Still, it was a disappointing thirteen kilometres short of the summit.
However, just before the expedition was abandoned an occurrence truly cruel and bizarre took place.
At the time, a team of two climbers was pushing up from what was then the highest camp, at twelve thousand metres, in order to establish a new camp above. Roped together, they had been labouring up an eighty-degree pitch for some two hours in fine and sunny conditions. They had just crossed over the twelve-thousand-one-hundred-metre mark, when the leading climber, Henri Paillon, paused to wait as the lower climber, Pierre du Gast, came up on the line Henri had just fixed to the face. As he waited, Henri looked out westward to admire the view.
What he saw made his heart—until that moment safely warmed against the subzero temperature by his suit—freeze.
It was, in Henri’s own words, a ‘riviere noire du vent’ (‘river of black wind’), curling towards the Wheel out of the south-west. It was not actually black, he would later explain, nor even tacitly visible. He sensed it as much through some unknown faculty as through his eyes. Or perhaps, as others have suggested, there was a natural form of the Schlieren optical effect in operation that day in the upper atmosphere, by which the normally invisible fluidic motions of the air became visible. Either way, Henri somehow knew that a thousand metres below himself and his fellow climber, a vast swathe of furiously disturbed air was bending out of the south to blast upon the mountain.
He was seeing the jet stream.
Henri stared for maybe a minute in silence, morbidly fascinated. But when the northern edge of the river began to impact the southern flank of the Wheel, kicking up a storm of racing snowdrift, there was no room left for doubt, and his paralysis broke.
The wind was real, and it was going to hit them, there on the exposed face.
He shouted a warning to Pierre, still some ten metres lower down the pitch. They must both retreat at all speed to their camp below. There, a firmly anchored pressurised fibreglass ‘tent’ was waiting, designed to withstand hurricane force gales. They could hope to ride out the storm inside. But if the jet stream caught them in the open …
So they began as rapid a descent as possible. But in their bulky altitude suits progress was torturous, and they had moved no more than twenty metres before the Polar Jet, slipping swiftly northwards across the West Face, began to blast the mountain a kilometre below them. And most of the blast was deflected upwards, straight at the hapless climbers.
Along ridges and upon sheer faces, updrafts are common enough, and at times can be fierce, even on lower mountains. But this was a jet stream, of a force beyond anything other climbers had ever experienced. Paillon and du Gast were in a predicament unequalled in history.
They weren’t alone on the mountain, of course. The expedition had camps strung all the way down the West Face, three of which were also caught up in the jet stream blast. But the climbers in those camps were safe in their reinforced habitats, the tents themselves further secured in the lee of rock crannies or ledges. Henri and Pierre were trapped on an open face, with no means to secure themselves other than an ice axe each, and the fixed line they had just laid. Against win
ds that were estimated later at over four hundred kilometres per hour, and perhaps even greater, these frail defences were useless.
Paillon, the higher of the two men, and the only survivor, soon lost sight of his companion in the blinding snowdrift. In any case, he had no time to consider du Gast’s fate, he was too busy battling for his own life. The wind became so strong that he was forced to turn and face head down the slope, merely to hold his position, his axe embedded as deep as it could go and his body stretched out upwards beyond it, flailing about in the gale like a rag.
How long he held on like this he did not know. But abruptly there came a violent tug on the rope that connected him to du Gast. Du Gast had begun the storm below Paillon, but now the line spun Paillon about and dragged him up the cliff. For a bewildered moment he scraped upwards across the stony face, the rope dragging him, until by merciful luck he slammed rearwards into the underside of a rocky outcrop and jammed there, immoveable.
It was an agonising position. He was bent backwards, pinned by both the force of the wind and the pull from the rope, his spine so contorted that his face was to the sky. Later it would prove that three of his vertebrae were crushed, and two ribs broken. But it was the sight above him, vanishing and reappearing through the storm of raging spindrift, that struck Paillon with true horror.
Twenty metres overhead, attached to the other end of the rope, suspended in midair by the force of the gale, was the shape of a man.
It was Pierre. Clipped firmly to the line by his harness, the climber soared birdlike in the gale, tugging upwards still against the rope, for all that he and his suit together weighed over one hundred and twenty kilograms.
A human kite.
From below Paillon could not see his companion’s face through the glass of du Gast’s helmet, but from the movements of the man’s limbs Paillon was sure that his friend was still alive. Time and again, du Gast’s hands seemed to reach determinedly down along the rope to grip it, as if the airborne climber hoped to drag himself hand over hand back down to Earth. But ever and again a ferocious gust would blast his hands up and away, his ice axe, still tethered to his wrist, flailing about uselessly.
The grotesque spectacle went on, Paillon later estimated, for fully a minute at least, with Paillon himself helpless to intervene. Then du Gast’s flailing ice axe cut square across the line, severing it clean. His last link to Earth cut, du Gast lofted skywards, borne by the hurricane. He was still alive, Paillon was sure, and still trying desperately to claw his way down the rope, even as it billowed up all around him.
He vanished into the whiteout, and was never seen again.
A week later, the expedition was abandoned. Although Paillon survived the gale, which blew for some hours before subsiding, and although other climbers did establish several higher camps above twelve thousand metres, the heart was gone from the team. Already short of funds, and having already suffered too many casualties from equipment failure, avalanches and storms, du Gast’s awful fate was the last straw. The French went home.
That wasn’t the end of his story, however. In the years following there was much typically morbid speculation within the climbing community about du Gast’s fate. Where had his body ended up? To what place had the jet stream carried him?
Had he, for instance, been hoisted clear away from the slopes of the Wheel to fall to his death out to sea? Or had the wind deposited him somewhere higher up on the mountain? And if so, how high? Fourteen thousand metres, sixteen thousand metres, eighteen thousand metres? Even higher?
More intriguingly, could it be that he survived his ride upon the hurricane? Could it be that he found himself, wherever he landed, still fit and able to climb? What if—to let imagination run—he touched down somewhere within range of the Wheel’s summit? He was wearing an altitude suit, after all, and though it was an inferior model to those that followed, it would have been capable of life support, for a few hours at least, even at twenty-five thousand metres.
So could it be, could it possibly be, that in fact Pierre du Gast, and not Walter Richman, was the first man to stand atop the Wheel, even if he did not then live to make it back down again?
Does his body—so certain wistful climbers like to speculate—even now lie within the cave upon the Hand of God? After all, Walter Richman alone of mankind has looked into that cave, and to this day has not revealed what he saw there. Indeed, does this explain why Richman won’t reveal what he saw, because what he saw was proof that he was not after all the first person to stand there?
It’s a nice fantasy. But alas, it is, of course, impossible. For one, not even the strongest updrafts caused by a jet stream striking the Wheel have ever been recorded to rise above the eighteen-thousand-metre mark. And even if du Gast was deposited somehow unharmed at that extreme upper limit, he could never have climbed the seven kilometres to the summit in the last few hours left to him.
In any case, he most likely landed somewhat lower down. For although du Gast’s body was never discovered, climbers from the Richman expedition did indeed find a tattered fragment of old rope at an altitude of sixteen kilometres, where no rope should be, as no one, before the Richman climbers, had ever been that high before. It was not proof of anything, as it was an ordinary piece of climbing rope that could have been used by a dozen expeditions aside from the French one, and it could have been blown there by some other gale. Still, very probably it was a piece of the fateful line that had tethered du Gast kite-like in the last minutes of his life.
Which would mean that he rose, after the line broke, fully four kilometres in that awful gale. The terror he must have felt during that journey defies description. And most likely he died then upon final impact with the mountain, or from suffocation, if, as seems likely, his suit failed amid the trauma.
Still, he might not have died immediately. And while it seems certain he did not gain the summit, if he did survive the deadly ride on the wind, and landed upon the mountain at sixteen kilometres high or thereabouts, then he deserves his place in history. Because, for the few hours remaining to him, he was the highest and loneliest man of his age.
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The second account of the storms of the Wheel concerns an expedition that took place thirty years earlier than Herzog’s, and which was attempting to climb a different part of the mountain. In fact, it was attempting the other side of the mountain: the little known and rarely essayed East Face.
Now, the Wheel’s East Face is akin, in mountaineering circles, to the far side of the Moon in the field of astronomy. Oh, everyone has seen photos of the Moon’s far side, but only a handful of astronauts have beheld it with their own eyes, and none at all have ever walked there. Likewise, though dozens of cruise ships pass beneath the East Face every year, and in film and photography it is as familiar as the West Face, very few climbers have ever made any serious attempt to scale it.
The reasons are simple enough. The East Face is sheerer than the West, and the outward tilt of its slab formation makes it even more inhospitable to the climber; the eastern shoreline of the Wheel is utterly without harbour to land or house supplies; and higher up there is no convenient large ledge, such as the Plateau on the West Face, where an advanced base camp can be built.
All indisputable facts. But there is also a final, less tangible reason that so few climbers are attracted to the East Face. It feels—there’s no other word for—lonelier than the West Face. Yes, the West Face is hardly welcoming, but because of the arc shape of the Wheel, with its north and south extremities bending to the west, a climber on the West Face feels somewhat enfolded by the mountain, even if that enfolding can at times feel downright oppressive.
On the East Face, however, a climber feels much more naked and exposed, for on this side the arc of the Wheel curves away. Whatever section of the face you happen to be climbing feels like an out-thrust spine upon which you dangle vulnerably. Also, the East Face only gets direct sunlight in the morning, cold and weak, and is in shadow by noon, followed by a long, gloomy desc
ent into evening, a situation loathed by most climbers. The West Face, by comparison, though dark in the morning, basks in glorious sunshine throughout the afternoon and well beyond sea-level sunset.
No wonder then that the East Face is so friendless. Even so, there are always a few daring or foolhardy souls who relish the chance to defy the unpleasant and the difficult, and over the years there have been at least a dozen serious attempts made upon the grim eastern slopes. Most such expeditions failed without achieving much of note, and no one has ever climbed beyond ten thousand metres on the East Face, but one attempt has indeed gained immortality. It did so not for the altitude gained, however, but rather for the fiendish disaster that ended it.
The year was 1934, and a particularly masochistic Italian team was trying to be the first to ascend to serious heights on the East Face. At that time, no one had climbed beyond four thousand metres on the Wheel’s eastern side, and the Italians’ ambitious target was a prominent spike that protrudes from the centre of the Face at just over seven thousand metres, called ever since, even though the Italians did not reach it, the Roman Pillar.
It was hard going from the beginning. Merely getting the expedition’s supplies ashore on that long harbourless coast was an ordeal, and then, even with a base camp established, it was a torturous crawl upwards for the eight-man team on the hostile outward-tilting slabs. Nevertheless, after six weeks, they were nearing five thousand metres. It was then, however, that the weather intervened.
Unlike the West, the East Face is not exposed to the prevailing winds, either at high or low altitudes. Rather, it is a lee face, and so could reasonably be expected to be sheltered from the storms that batter against the west flank of the Wheel.
Things aren’t so simple in reality. It’s true that the East Face never endures winds like those that howl across the West, but that is not to say that the weather is always calm there. As the prevailing winds (and the jet stream) are compressed and diverted around the north and south shoulders of the Wheel, they find themselves in a ‘vacuum’ on the east side. And so, as water flowing around a boulder in a river will form whirlpools on the far side, the great air streams likewise create gigantic eddies across the Wheel’s East Face.
The Rich Man’s House Page 27