by Andrew Lock
This is the insidiousness of altitude. I’d forgotten that my attempt to record a position on the GPS on the way up hadn’t worked. It was therefore pointing across the face to Camp 3, where I’d taken a reading before we’d set out that morning. The GPS was working fine, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. We couldn’t traverse to Camp 3 until we found that path down through the ice cliffs onto the snow face below.
We pressed on, pushing ourselves harder, having no time for rest. We searched desperately for some identifiable feature that might indicate the path before darkness sentenced us to a night of hell. Or a lifetime of it. Reeling with exhaustion, dehydrated and altitude-sick, we were fighting for our lives. But it was a fool’s game. We’d lost the race.
At 7600 metres, we stopped. We debated the route but couldn’t be sure of what we saw below us on the near-vertical slope. I felt we should traverse to the right, while Neil thought the opposite. Normally, I’d follow my instincts, but the GPS confusion caused me to doubt myself. To continue down-climbing now would put us in even greater danger—we’d either fall over the edge of one of the seracs below us or cause it to collapse with us on it. Dead either way. By myself, I might have taken the risk, but I had no right to risk Neil’s life. We decided to bivouac.
*
Bivouac! How many was this now? My third? Yet again I would have to survive on the side of an 8000er without a tent, a sleeping bag, a stove, any food or auxiliary oxygen. It meant an extra night at high altitude, where every minute would bring me closer to the fatal onset of oedema. And on my last climb. The alternative was worse, though, so I resigned myself to it. So be it, I thought. Just have to survive again.
Neil was stoic and accepted the situation. We had no snow shovel, so we scraped a tiny ledge out of the steep snow slope with our ice axes, then sat on our backpacks for a tiny degree of insulation. I didn’t expect to sleep, but just in case, I embedded the shaft of my ice axe into the snow and clipped my harness to it. Then I unstrapped my crampons from my boots and clipped them to the ice axe as well. Finally, I checked that all my layers of clothing were fully zipped up, and all pockets closed.
Our wait for the dawn began. This would be my longest bivouac on an 8000-metre peak. As we were on the north side of the mountain, above the bleak Tibetan plateau, we knew it would be fearsomely cold. I cinched my beefy down hood more tightly around my head and glanced at Neil, who was already hunched over, trying to conserve heat, cocooned in his own private world of suffering. With the end of my 8000er project so near, with victory so tantalising close, I was once again huddled, frozen, clinging to life and hope and a desire to end both the expedition and the entire project.
The mountain had played with us, taunting us with opportunity, tempting me with a goal that had consumed me for sixteen years. And now she was demanding her fee. Having summitted late in the day, we’d accepted that we would have to descend in darkness. But getting trapped at nearly 8000 metres with a blizzard forecast for the following day was not part of the plan. I’d experienced it before, and it wasn’t fun.
The snow was still falling but the wind had steadied. It was 7.30 p.m.—nine and a half hours to go. It became bitterly cold, at least minus 20 degrees Celsius, and I regretted my decision to leave a layer of clothing in the tent that morning. Already the snow was several inches deep on my legs. But the wind was the real concern. It was forecast to increase to a gale. Until now it had mostly just snowed, but the snow had also been forecast for tomorrow, not tonight.
With my feet dangling over a precipice, for which the darkness was probably a blessing, I settled into my thoughts: Lost, frozen, at night, at nearly 8000 metres, on near vertical terrain and a blizzard threatening. Chances of survival? Not high, I suppose. Be a shame if the dream ends here, so close to the end. Did I stuff up? No, we did it right, but we made our choice to push on late in the day and this is the result. So accept it and survive. Right.
I’m lucky that way, I suppose. Once I’ve made a decision, I’m prepared to live with its consequences. There’s no point in regretting it. It actually gives me strength and purpose. As I thought about our situation, it started to feel like a challenge: Would I have the strength to handle the ramifications of my decisions? The answer would be known in a few hours’ time. In some perverse way, I even began to enjoy it. I didn’t just want to win the fight, I wanted to have it—not so much for the victory but for the fight itself. I wanted to know if I could cope with it, if I was good enough.
I was cold. So sick of being cold. I wanted to sleep but didn’t dare allow myself. I brushed more snow from the opening in the hood of my down suit and considered checking my watch but steeled myself for the inevitable disappointment. Bitter experience had taught me that time slows almost to a stop in bivouacs. The only thing that really continues at full pace is the pain.
I pulled my sleeve back down over the watch without looking and instead glanced up at the sky: still no moon. The snow continued to fall, but the cloud was patchy with an occasional glimpse of a star. Most importantly, the wind had not increased. I was already so frozen that any further deterioration of the weather would finish me. I glanced towards Neil, who was all but indistinguishable under a blanket of fresh snow. I asked if he was alive and received a grunt in reply. Still alive and still no complaints. Solid.
I drifted in and out of lucid thought, so cold that my water bottle froze inside my down suit. I’d carried two half-litre bottles through the day and had hardly touched them. As we’d settled down for the bivouac, Neil told me that he was out of water, so I’d given him one of mine. Now my remaining bottle had frozen, so it was yet another big summit day without a drink. My kidneys hurt. But so did my back and my head and my poor frozen feet. Nothing you can do about it, I told myself, so just put up with it.
My dehydration was causing me to cough a lot, and I spat out some great lumps. Some were like huge fur balls from deep down in my throat. They were so big and flesh-like that I thought I was actually coughing up bits of my throat.
I wiggled my toes but there was no feeling—I couldn’t tell if they were moving or not. By now I’d made twenty-three 8000-metre expeditions without frostbite, and it was a record I wanted to maintain. I wiggled them harder. Come on, guys, just a few more hours. It’s the last time, I promise! After ten minutes of flexing toes and swinging legs, I felt a very faint something. The feeling was so distant that I really didn’t know if I was just imagining it. It was as though my toes had been wrapped in wool and stuffed inside wooden clogs.
The night seemed interminable. No words can really describe the misery, the endlessness. The wind picked up and then eased off. Icy snow flurries came and went. Stars appeared—and, with them, hope. But the cloud teased us and closed back over, as if it to say, ‘Ha, sorry, mate, it isn’t that easy. You want this summit? You want to claim all fourteen? Then you have to earn it. You have to pay a little more.’
I became angry. Fine, I thought. Anger cleared my head and brought back my focus. Bring it on! I would survive this night. I would succeed on this mountain. I would finish this project.
I shuffled around, forcing blood through my aching limbs, brushed yet more snow from my down suit and gazed out across Tibet. I looked for signs of life, of humanity. There were none, but I realised that it was now possible to distinguish a few features of the terrain way below us. It was getting fractionally, imperceptibly lighter, and I knew that we were on the home stretch.
*
When it was finally light enough for us to start down from our high-altitude perch I prodded Neil. We fought the stiffness in our limbs to reaffix our crampons, then donned our packs and began descending. We barely spoke a word but were grateful to be moving.
Very quickly we saw the route through the ice cliffs below us, and I realised that I’d been right after all about which way we should go. Could have saved ourselves a cold night out, I thought. Whatever, we’re alive. The only thing that mattered now was to get back to our tent—to our stove, its fuel and the
blissful nectar of freshly melted snow.
We tried to hurry but our exhaustion prevented it. Every few steps we’d stop, pant for breath, fight the urge to collapse and sleep, then push on. Gradually, we traversed back under the big seracs and down-climbed, slowly and painfully, to the camp. I was so tired that several times I just toppled sideways and fell like a tree into the snow.
When we finally staggered to our tent, it was 8.30 a.m., three hours after we’d set out from the bivouac. It had taken us longer to climb down from the bivouac point than to climb up to it the day before. But we were there and we were alive. Neil got the stove going.
I knew that our friends at Base Camp would be worried by our failure to make contact last night, so I dug out the radio and made a hoarse call. Immediately, we were answered and I heard whooping and crying and laughter in the background. I’d like to have done all three of those things myself but hadn’t the energy.
Neil passed me a tepid cup of water. There were bits of food in it left over from a previous meal, and some oily film on the surface. I gulped it down—liquid gold. We rested and drank more. Slowly, as imperceptibly as that frozen dawn, we came back to life. More than anything, we wanted to sleep, but we couldn’t. The forecast storm would soon be upon us and it had been snowing heavily since we arrived back at camp. We had to descend to a safer altitude where we could wait out any delays. We crammed our equipment haphazardly into our packs, struggled to lift them, and then lurched drunkenly down the mountain.
It took many hours to descend a distance that would normally have taken just a few. We were forced to stop at Camp 1 for another night because we simply couldn’t go on. We slept as if in a coma. But we were alive.
The next day, as we trudged along the glacier, we were met by Kinga and Horia, a climber from another expedition, who escorted us back to Base Camp. It was good of them to help us, although I’d prefer to have finished the descent alone. For me, the climb wasn’t over until I made that final step into Base Camp. After that I could relax, socialise and share the experience. Still, it was good to have the company and their excitement sparked us up a little. Despite all my expeditions and the previous bivouacs, this one had exhausted me to the core. I was almost asleep on my feet.
At Base Camp there were many backslaps and congratulations for us, but I quickly retired to my tent. I wasn’t yet ready to switch off from the intensity of the experience. I was back in my cave, as I had been after Annapurna. But this time it was a good place, a private place, which only those who’d shared the experience, or lived through a similar one, could enter. I felt an indescribably strong inner glow. I felt sated, enriched and worthy. I had not conquered the mountain—or any other mountain, for that matter—but I’d faced the challenges it had thrown at me and overcome them. I’d tested myself to the limit and endured.
I felt simultaneously insignificant and equal with the mountain, although I knew that Shishapangma saw it differently. She had played with me, entertained herself with me, forced me to grovel to discover her secrets. With those dues paid, she had allowed me to know her. She had considered destroying me at the end, only to allow me, at the very last, to live. She had been in control, not me. We were not equals.
But I was alive and my senses were in overdrive. There was a small patch of semi-frozen grass at Base Camp—its fragrance seemed so strong that I could almost taste it. The stream that trickled past my tent was life itself, bubbling and splashing across the rocks. The clouds above me were more beautiful than I could describe, and I was warm. Warm!
Images rolled through my mind as I relived every moment of our summit day. I had a knot in my stomach, not from the hardship or danger but from the thrill of it. I was riding an internal wave of emotion and adrenaline.
I wasn’t yet ready to think about the fact that I’d completed the fourteen 8000ers. At that point I was still in the zone on Shishapangma. This was the incredible buzz I’d felt after all my 8000-metre summits. The feeling was so powerful it blocked out all distractions. My whole existence seemed tangibly linked to the mountain, our energies blended.
Gradually, though, the adrenaline surge wore off and I came out of my cave and began re-engaging with the human world. And it was fun. I socialised with the other expeditions and regaled them with the story of our climb. After such a tough experience, to sit at Base Camp and watch other climbers prepare for their own assaults on the peak was immensely peaceful. I was excited for them, knowing the struggle they’d face, but knowing also that my battle was over. It had been a great fight, and I was relieved that I didn’t have to re-enter the fray.
I don’t think anyone really understood just how significant the summit of Shishapangma was for me—not because it was my fourteenth 8000er but because of the number of times I’d attempted it. Amazingly, it was my sixth attempt, if I counted the trip earlier that year when I hadn’t even made it out of Kathmandu. Six! It seemed unbelievable that the lowest of the 8000ers could have caused me so much trouble. But I’d have attempted it sixteen times if I’d had to. Nothing in the world could have stopped me from returning until I finally succeeded.
As it was, Neil and I were the only climbers to reach the true summit of Shishapangma in 2009. Mine was also the first Australian ascent of the mountain, the sixth time that I’d made a first Australian ascent of an 8000-metre peak. That’s a record that can never be broken. And I became not only the first Australian but also the first member of the British Commonwealth to have climbed all fourteen of the world’s 8000-metre mountains.
Perhaps most satisfying of all, though, was that while Shishapangma was the final ascent in my project to climb all the 8000ers, it was Neil’s first summit of an 8000-metre peak. He’d been a great expedition partner on three expeditions and had finally tasted his own success. I was pleased to have been part of his first triumph. It was time for me to hand over the baton to the next generation, and Neil was a perfectly appropriate person to hand it to.
And then it was time to go home.
15
THE NEXT STEP
If adventure has a final and all-embracing motive, it is surely this: we go out because it is our nature to go out, to climb mountains, and to paddle rivers, to fly to the planets and plunge into the depths of the oceans … When man ceases to do these things, he is no longer man.
Wilfred Noyce
LIFE, WHEN I returned to Australia in mid October, was a bit of a whirlwind. I received hundreds of congratulatory emails from people around the world, many of whom I’d never met but who’d followed my climbing career. I was very touched by their kind words. I was also presented with the Adventurer of the Year award by the Australian Geographic Society. To be judged by my peers as having achieved something worthwhile meant a lot to me.
After sixteen years, the wider media finally decided that it, too, was interested in my 8000er project. I’d had a few genuinely interested media followers over the years, but suddenly everyone wanted to know what the view from Everest was like, how many bodies I’d seen and how many near-death experiences I’d had. Almost all the interviewers completely missed the point of why I’d undertaken the climbs. Few asked about my motivation, the psychological challenges and rewards that I’d experienced, or the journey of self-discovery that the mountains had provided me.
One climbing website demanded a photo of Neil and me on the summit of Shishapangma, so that they could ‘verify’ our ascent—not that they’d have known it from any other summit. This really offended me. The successful ascents of all my other climbs had been well documented and witnessed by others—but now, on this last peak, my claim needed to be proven to some armchair climbers who reported on climbing rather than actually doing it? Were they really suggesting that I was going to lie about a summit when I’d made six separate attempts to achieve it? It just proved that these people didn’t get the point of why I, and probably most other serious climbers, took on the big peaks. For me, it was specifically for the challenge of getting to the summit, not simply to claim that
I’d reached it. The whole point was to see if I could do it. If I’d lied about this or any other summit, I’d have cheated myself of the answer to my own question.
I suspect the website just wanted our summit photo so they could have an exclusive for their website viewers, but I’d made a commitment to my sponsors to give them first rights to that picture. I had taken a GPS reading on Shishapangma’s summit, however, so I downloaded the metadata from the GPS unit and sent it to the website. It wasn’t what they wanted but it certainly proved that we’d reached the summit. I didn’t hear from them again.
There was also some debate floating around the ether—again among armchair climbing website hosts—about whether or not Neil and I had completed a new route in our ascent of Shishapangma. On my blog I’d reported that I didn’t know if we had. I thought we’d probably combined a couple of previously climbed lines at the bottom of the North Face; certainly the summit ridge had previously been climbed. The question revolved around our route on the face itself. The debate raged furiously among non-climbers—and, like those in the media, they missed the point.
Whether it was a new route, a variation of another route or just an old route mattered little to me. What mattered was that the climb and the bivouac had tested Neil and me to our limits. It had been an extraordinary expedition and the most fitting way possible to end my Summit 8000 project. Ultimately, though, the ascent of Shishapangma hadn’t only been about completing the project. It had also been about climbing Shishapangma itself—meeting and overcoming that mountain’s specific challenges and obstacles.