by Andrew Lock
The first leg was a thirty-minute flight from Kathmandu to a remote mountain airstrip at a village called Lukla in an ancient twenty-seater Twin Otter aircraft. Lukla’s airstrip is one of Sir Edmund Hillary’s many extraordinary achievements. It is literally perched halfway up a mountain—its runway has a fifteen-degree slope. Our little aircraft clawed its way over successively higher mountain passes until we skimmed over the highest gap just above the treetops, then dropped steeply towards the dirt runway. As we plunged through the clouds, I saw through our plane’s windscreen, on either side of the landing strip, the wreckage of aircraft that had previously landed poorly. Now, that makes you fasten your seatbelt!
Thankfully, our pilot was better than those from the various wreckages and, after a siren had sounded at the airstrip, motivating the locals to usher their grazing cattle out of the way, we landed with a thud before going to full revs to drive uphill to the top of the strip. We quickly disembarked and our luggage was tossed out after us, then the little plane roared back down the hill, dropping out of sight into the valley until it gained sufficient airspeed to start the climb back to the high pass, en route to Kathmandu. That flight is surely one of the world’s classics. Since my first visit, they have tarred the runway, cleared away some of the wreckage and built a fence around the airstrip, if only to keep the cattle safe.
From this high mountain village (altitude 3300 metres), deep within the Sherpa region of Nepal, we commenced our trek to Everest. Over ten days we moved through progressively smaller and more remote villages, until we left the last shacks behind and crossed the Khumbu Glacier to reach Everest base camp.
The camp was pitched somewhat haphazardly on the rock and ice moraine of the Khumbu Glacier. Many hours of labour were required to hack relatively flat spots for our tents and to build our home for the next two months. As necessary as it was to focus on the work at hand, I could barely concentrate. In front loomed the world’s highest mountain, its cloud-enshrouded summit an overwhelming 3.5 vertical kilometres above us. It was absolutely monstrous. The years of training and climbing around the world I’d done to prepare for this very moment seemed worthless. I felt very small indeed.
We decided that the best way to succeed, and survive, would be to tackle the challenge in the traditional way of climbing at high altitude, known as siege style. This meant that we’d acclimatise as we climbed, rather than acclimatising elsewhere and then trying to ascend the mountain in a single push. At 8848 metres, Everest reaches well into the ‘death zone’, where a human body can spend only a limited amount of time before its internal mechanisms start to shut down, leading devastatingly quickly to death. The death zone is what makes Everest—and indeed all the 8000-metre peaks—so dangerous.
The world’s atmosphere, the air, has weight. At sea level, all that atmosphere weighing down on you creates pressure. Measured in millibars, it is around 970 to 1030 millibars, depending on the weather systems. The higher into the atmosphere you climb, the less of it there is above you, and therefore the less weight, or pressure, there is bearing down on you. Atmospheric pressure impacts on your ability to absorb oxygen from the air. At 8000 metres, the pressure is around 250 millibars, just a quarter of the pressure at sea level, so from each breath the body gets only a quarter of the oxygen that it needs. That’s why we call it ‘thin air’.
The human body is, to a certain extent, adaptable. Over time it can adjust to lower pressure. That’s what acclimatisation is. One thing the body does is develop more red blood cells (haemoglobin) in order to better absorb the oxygen. Up to around 3000 metres, there is little need to acclimatise, but above that the general guide is that you should ascend not more than 300 metres per day to allow your body to adjust. The base camps of the 8000-metre peaks are at altitudes of between 4000 and 5100 metres, which means the journey in requires a minimum of four to five days, and up to two weeks, to achieve the appropriate acclimatisation en route. For that reason, we’d deliberately taken ten days for our trek to Everest base camp.
Acclimatising to the base camp altitude simply means you have adjusted enough not to drop dead right then and there. Of course, as you proceed up the mountain you must continue to acclimatise, and even that will allow you only the briefest moment on the summit. It is a long, slow process, taking about a month at 4000 metres or higher to be sufficiently acclimatised to make an attempt on an 8000-metre summit.
Nobody, including the Sherpas, can acclimatise enough to live at high altitude permanently. Above about 4000 metres, you are on borrowed time—and that time reduces exponentially as you go higher. So acclimatisation is about spending the appropriate amount of time up high for your body to adapt to the altitude, but not too long, because your body starts to shut down from the moment you reach base camp.
With that understanding, we spent a couple of days setting up our Base Camp and acclimatising to its altitude, then started the assault by climbing each day for about six hours up the 800 metres from Base Camp to Camp 1, through the infamous Khumbu Icefall. This is a jumble of massive ice blocks, some as big as multistorey buildings, which have broken away from the face of the glacier above and tumbled partway down the steep slope towards Base Camp. They balance precariously on top of each other, threatening to collapse without warning. It is the most objectively dangerous part of the entire climb.
The route winds its way beside, between and over these ice blocks, and we frequently felt the entire icefall rumble and shunt as a block collapsed somewhere, dropping hundreds of tonnes of ice onto the path. On one occasion I saw a massive ripple sweep from one side of the icefall to the other, around 500 metres in width, as the glacier below settled. It made for nervous climbing and we stopped only when desperate to catch our breath, and even then only for the shortest time necessary.
At the top of the icefall, we found a suitable site for our Camp 1. On a level patch of ice surrounded by crevasses we erected two tents, to store all the provisions and equipment, then, given we’d climbed more than the recommended 300 metres per day, descended to base camp that afternoon. A typical load was around 15 to 20 kilograms, and consisted of a tent, four days’ worth of food and gas, a sleeping bag and also our everyday items—a couple of different jackets, water, a couple of snack bars, mittens, gloves, glasses, goggles, pen knife, balaclava, sun hat, radio, sunscreen, camera, climbing equipment for the route, ice axe and crampons. For several days, we repeated the process until we had sufficient supplies stored at Camp 1 to enable us to occupy that camp and commence carrying loads to Camp 2.
Simultaneously we were enhancing our acclimatisation by climbing up to the higher altitude of Camp 1 each day but returning to sleep in the thicker air of Base Camp each night. The high-altitude acclimatisation mantra is ‘climb high, sleep low’, which is precisely what we were doing. By the time we’d fully stocked Camp 1, we’d also enhanced our acclimatisation sufficiently to be able to stay at that camp without serious ill effects. This is siege-style climbing.
The route to Camp 2 was much less intimidating than the Khumbu Icefall but had its own challenges. Rising from 6100 to 6500 metres, we trudged our way up a long glacier known as the Western Cwm (pronounced Coom). The cwm is littered with giant crevasses, some as wide as 10 metres. To cross them, we tiptoed carefully over aluminium ladders lashed together and laid across the black voids below. That glacier is several hundred metres in depth—not the place to lose your balance.
From Camp 2 the route rises steeply up an ice slope known as the Lhotse Face. This is absolutely enormous. It stretches from around 6500 metres to the very summit of Lhotse, almost 2 vertical kilometres above. It is a huge concave expanse of ice, wider than it is high. From a distance, climbers look like fly specks against its vastness. This is the part of the mountain that sorts the pretenders from those with the motivation for the summit.
Hour upon hour, climbers must haul themselves up this slope with their loads balanced on their backs, the steep angle stressing their ankles, calves and thigh muscles to exhaustion, ev
ery step into ever-thinning air. At 7300 metres, about halfway up the face, ledges are hacked from the ice for Camp 3, and tents are positioned among small, stable cliffs of ice that, at best, provide scant protection from the threat of avalanches. This camp is so high that you look down at the summit of Pumori. And Camp 3 is barely halfway up Everest.
Above Camp 3, climbers ascend steepening ground, before traversing leftwards up and across the entire Lhotse Face towards Everest. En route, they must overcome a cliff of slippery limestone rock known as the Yellow Band, and a final steep and shattered cliff called the Geneva Spur before staggering onto the South Col to place Camp 4 at 7950 metres. A saddle between Lhotse and Everest, the South Col is enormous and would accommodate several football fields. It is relatively flat and provides a great point from which expeditions can launch their summit attempts. But it is fearfully cold and almost constantly windy, as it provides a convenient passage for weather systems to move between the mountains.
We followed the same process of ferrying loads to higher camps, acclimatising as we did so, until all four camps were in place. It was exhausting work and we frequently returned to Base Camp to rest for a couple of days, as physical recovery is much better there than at higher altitudes.
While chilling out at base camp, I met the Kazakhstani mountaineer Anatoli Bukreev, who was climbing with a French expedition. Ethnically a Russian, Anatoli was powerfully built, and he soon proved that his reputation as a very strong climber at high altitude was no myth. He had been a member of the 1989 Russian expedition that had completed the first traverse of the four peaks of Kanchenjunga. Technically, a mountain may have only one summit, but Kanchenjunga has four distinct peaks, all above 8000 metres. Traversing all four was a superb mountaineering achievement. Before coming to Everest in 1991, he had just completed a new route on the West Wall of Dhaulagiri, another 8000er.
A few weeks into our expedition, I had the opportunity to observe him in his element. While I was climbing from Camp 2 to Camp 3, at around 7000 metres’ altitude, I was stunned to be overtaken by Anatoli, who was carrying twice my load. Even more amazingly, though, he was wearing only a pair of sneakers on his feet, while I was clumping my way up in a pair of heavily insulated mountain boots.
Clearly unflappable by nature, Anatoli had a quiet temperament and a ready smile. Most evenings at Base Camp he’d play his guitar and sing mournful Russian folk songs in the French team’s dining tent. I didn’t understand the words but loved the melodies. One night I asked him what he was singing about. In heavily accented English, he said, ‘I sing that the winter is cold, the snow is deep, the cattle is dead, the crops is failed, my wife is leave me and my children is in the war, but … life is okay.’
I soon discovered that the expedition cooks were also doing their best to amuse us, mainly through their interpretation of westerners’ diets. They developed the idea, probably after we showed them how to cook a pizza, that we liked cheese melted over the top of everything. On more than one occasion our cook served us a chocolate cake or apple pie with melted yak’s cheese on top. The quality food in Base Camp, though, was a far cry from our diet on the mountain.
I’d been on several expeditions to mountains with summits that rose above 6000 or 7000 metres. On those trips I’d found it easy to eat most things, because the altitude of our camps had not been too extreme. But Everest introduced me to the harsh realities of living at the altitudes of those summits as we struggled towards a far higher peak. Eating above Base Camp was almost impossible, as was sleeping. Cooking food and melting snow to drink meant using precious canisters of gas. The human body can’t digest protein at altitude, and does a pretty poor job of absorbing nutrients generally, so we ate mostly biscuits and saved the gas for tea. The recommended fluid intake at these altitudes is 8 litres per day, due to the extremely dry air and constant exertion of six to eight hours of climbing. At best we were able to melt around 3 litres each per day. We were constantly nauseous, with splitting headaches from the altitude and dehydration. On the odd occasion that we did eat, more often than not we threw it straight back up. We could literally see our bodies withering.
The other new experience for me was the intense cold of high altitude. Not having sufficient oxygen to survive meant that we couldn’t generate adequate body heat to stay warm. To compensate, we wore numerous layers of clothing—long heavyweight thermal underwear, then a layer of fleece and then a down vest. At the lower altitudes we wore a windproof suit over the top of these layers, but above 7000 metres, substituted it with a massive, down-filled suit. It was like climbing in a sleeping bag. Yet still we were chilled to the core.
Despite all the obstacles though, we were focussed and loved the experience. We were on Everest!
We made steady progress up the mountain as we acclimatised. One day, however, Groom was working with the French team high on the Lhotse Face, fixing ropes from Camp 3 across the Yellow Band towards Camp 4, while Ian, Mark and I were at Camp 2, around a thousand metres below. With binoculars, we could just make out the tiny figures on the massive mountain face. Suddenly an avalanche let go from the slopes above them. We watched, fascinated but helpless, as a wave of snow rolled inexorably down to the climbers, who were frantically trying to run across the slope to avoid the onslaught.
Most of them made it to safety, but one climber did not. The river of white hit him with such force that his rope snapped like string, and he was swept the full 1000 metres down the face, to the glacier below. Down at Camp 2 we waited, hearts in our mouths, as the snow cloud slowly cleared, revealing two black dots amid the ice debris at the base of the Lhotse face. We didn’t know who’d been avalanched, but it was a climber, or climbers, so we raced to help.
In the rarefied air it took us twenty minutes to get to the face. We shuffled and struggled as fast as we could, filled with dread at the thought of what we’d find. Incredibly, as we approached, one of the black dots started moving. We soon realised it was Groom. He was battered, bruised and concussed but okay. The other black dot turned out to be his backpack. Groom was able to walk, so we escorted him back to Camp 2, wrapped him in a sleeping bag and tended to his many grazes and bruises. After a couple of days’ rest he descended to Base Camp, his expedition over.
Groom’s survival was unprecedented. Everyone else who has fallen so far down that face has been killed, and usually ended up inside the massive bergschrund between the bottom of the Lhotse Face and the Western Cwm. He probably survived because we were climbing in the post-monsoon season, which meant that the Lhotse Face had a good covering of snow. He had a relatively soft ride. The bergschrund was filled in, so he tumbled right over the top of it. By rights, he should have been broken into little pieces but, miraculously, he had survived. Some Sherpas said that he’d left one life and begun a new one.
Groom’s injuries were not even the worst from the incident. While he had been caught in the middle of the face, other climbers, who’d made it to the side of the slope and out of the path of the avalanche, had nonetheless been attached to the same rope that had snapped. The violent jarring of the rope caused them to lose their footing. One was knocked from his stance and fell several metres, landing on the leader of the French expedition. The twelve steel points of the falling climber’s crampons, so effective at penetrating hard ice, sliced neatly through the Frenchman’s skin and bone, badly injuring him. What followed was a long and difficult evacuation, as his team lowered him down the face.
Our much smaller team was soon reduced to two because Mark hadn’t acclimatised well. This meant that only Ian and I would attempt the summit. We climbed to Camp 4, rested for a few hours, then set out at midnight, without oxygen. It was cold, dark and intimidating. At around 8200 metres Ian’s headlamp failed. We continued by the light of my headlamp, but at around 8300 metres Ian complained that his hands were freezing and that he had to go down. Without a headlamp, he couldn’t see the way.
I had no choice but to give up my own summit attempt and escort him down. We desc
ended all the way to Base Camp over the next few days because, having climbed so high without auxiliary oxygen, I hadn’t the strength to launch a second summit attempt without a rest. After a couple of days at Base Camp, I started out again by myself and climbed to about 7000 metres. But by then the mountain had sapped all my strength and I had to face the reality that my expedition was over too.
Still, I reflected, it wasn’t a bad first attempt. Without the headlamp issue we might actually have made it. I was disappointed but not put off, and I resolved to return and complete the challenge.
*
Soon after I returned to Australia, Tashi Tenzing, a Sherpa who was working for an Australian trekking agency, asked me to help him put together an expedition to Everest for 1993. I learned that Tashi had been approached by two expatriate Macedonians living in Australia, Trajce Aleksov (known as ‘Alex’) and Dimitar Todorovski, who wanted to go to Everest to recover the body of a friend who’d died high on the mountain a few years earlier. Both were very strong climbers but were unsure how to initiate an expedition from Australia. They’d approached Tashi because they’d seen his name in the media somewhere and assumed he was an experienced climber.
Tashi was a maternal grandson of Tenzing Norgay, who’d made the first ascent of Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary in 1953. Tashi wasn’t an experienced climber, but he had worked for an Australian trekking company and had later married one of the Australian trek leaders. He’d graduated to working as a trek leader and adopted his grandfather’s Christian name as his surname.