They had a short rest and Hillary changed both his and Tenzing’s oxygen bottles for full ones. Then they set out, Hillary out in front, cutting big steps for their ungainly, cramponned high-altitude boots, down a slope of good firm snow leading to the col between the Main and South Summits. Tenzing kept him on a tight rope, and then followed down. From the col they followed the heavily corniced ridge, moving carefully, one at a time. Hillary noticed that Tenzing had slowed down badly and was panting hard; he checked Tenzing’s oxygen mask and saw that one of the valves was iced up so that he was getting hardly any oxygen. Quickly, he cleared it and they carried on, cutting steps, edging their way round ledges, ever conscious of the dizzy drop down into the Western Cwm, 2,438 metres below.
The most serious barrier was a vertical rock step in the ridge. At first glance it looked smooth and unclimbable, but then Hillary noticed a gap between the cornice that was peeling away from the rock on the right of the ridge and the wall of the rock itself.
‘In front of me was the rock wall, vertical, but with a few promising holds. Behind me was the ice wall of the cornice, glittering and hard but cracked here and there. I took a hold on the rock in front and then jammed one of my crampons hard into the ice behind. Leaning back with my oxygen set on the ice, I slowly levered myself upwards. Searching feverishly with my spare boot, I found a tiny ledge on the rock and took some of the weight off with my other leg. Leaning back on the cornice, I fought to regain my breath. Constantly at the back of my mind was the fear that the cornice might break off, and my nerves were taut with suspense. But slowly, I forced my way up - wriggling and jamming and using every little hold. In one place I managed to force my ice axe into a crack in the ice, and this gave me the necessary purchase to get over a holdless stretch. And then I found a solid foothold in a hollow in the ice, and next moment I was reaching over the top of the rock and pulling myself to safety. The rope came tight – its forty feet had been barely enough.’
Tenzing then followed.
‘As I heaved hard on the rope Tenzing wriggled his way up the crack and finally collapsed exhausted at the top like a giant fish when it has just been hauled from the sea after a terrible struggle.
‘I checked both our oxygen sets and roughly calculated our flow rates. Everything seemed to be going well. Probably owing to the strain imposed on him by the trouble with his oxygen set, Tenzing had been moving rather slowly but he was climbing safely and this was the major consideration. His only comment on my enquiring of his condition was to smile and wave along the ridge.’
They had now overcome the last real barrier and at last, at 11.30 in the morning, Hillary, with Tenzing just behind him, reached the highest point on earth. Suddenly everything dropped away around them. They could gaze down the North Ridge of Everest, across the endless and brown hills of Tibet, across to Kangchenjunga in the east and the serried peaks of the Himalaya to the west. They shook hands, embraced, flew their flags in those few moments of untrammelled delight, of complete unity in what they had achieved. Then they started the long and hazardous way down.
The first ascent of Everest caught the imagination of the entire world to a degree as great, if not greater than, any other venture before or since. Only the arrival of the first man on the moon, a victory of supreme technology, perhaps surpassed man’s reaching the highest point on earth. But the very scale of the interest and adulation brought its accompanying problems the moment the expedition reached the Kathmandu valley. Nepali nationalists wanted to adopt Tenzing as a standard-bearer for their own cause; the adulating crowds pounced upon him, shouting, ‘Tenzing zindabad, long live Tenzing!’ They ignored Hillary and waved placards which depicted Tenzing arriving at the summit of Everest hauling behind him a fat and helpless white man. Hunt and Hillary were awarded knighthoods, Tenzing the George Medal. The fact that, as an Indian or Nepali citizen, he was not allowed to accept a foreign title was ignored and, inevitably, the Indian and Nepali press tried to exploit what they described as a racist slight to Tenzing.
Hillary, perhaps extra sensitive to the implications that he was hauled to the summit by Tenzing, wrote a frank description of what he thought happened on the day of the summit bid. Tenzing was affronted by the suggestion, which I suspect was true, that Hillary took the initiative on the push to the summit, particularly from the South Summit onwards. In his autobiography, Man of Everest, compiled by the American novelist, James Ramsay Ullman, Tenzing stated:
‘I must be honest and say that I do not feel his account, as told in The Ascent of Everest, is wholly accurate. For one thing he has written that this gap up the rock wall was about forty feet high, but in my judgement it was little more than fifteen. Also, he gives the impression that it was only he who really climbed it on his own, and that he then practically pulled me, so that I “finally collapsed exhausted at the top, like a giant fish when it has just been hauled from the sea after a terrible struggle”. Since then I have heard plenty about that “fish” and I admit I do not like it. For it is the plain truth that no one pulled or hauled me up the gap, I climbed it myself, just as Hillary had done; and if he was protecting me with the rope while I was doing it, this was no more than I had done for him.’
In their own ways both accounts are probably true, but it is noticeable that Hillary toned down his account of how Tenzing climbed the step, both in his own personal story of the expedition, High Adventure, and in his autobiography, Nothing Venture, Nothing Win.
The other members of the expedition, who had helped Hillary and Tenzing reach the top, got only a fraction of the acclaim. The public needs easily identifiable heroes and is little interested in whole teams. The team itself, however, has held together, meeting regularly for reunions and, in various combinations, joining each other for other climbs or expeditions. Perhaps this is the ultimate tribute to the leadership of John Hunt.
Charles Evans avoided the fanfares of the return journey, going off trekking to the south of Everest. Two years later he led a small, low-key expedition to Kangchenjunga, third highest mountain of the world, and George Band, the youngest of the Everest team, who had had difficulty in acclimatising, reached the summit with Joe Brown, the Manchester plumber who was the representative of a new driving force in British climbing. Wilf Noyce, too, went on to climb other mountains in the Himalaya, until he was killed in the Pamirs in 1962 with the brilliant young Scottish climber, Robin Smith. George Lowe made the Antarctic crossing with Vivian Fuchs, meeting Ed Hillary who led the New Zealand contingent coming in the opposite direction, and ended up marrying one of John Hunt’s daughters.
John Hunt’s career was undoubtedly helped, as in fact was that of most of the others, by his experience on the Everest expedition, but he has always remained a distinguished public servant rather than an adventurer. After retiring from the army, he ran the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme for some years, before becoming chairman of the Parole Board. He has also taken part in several public enquiries and became a Life Peer in reward for his many and varied public services. Ed Hillary, also, has put a great deal back. His greatest work and contribution has undoubtedly been with the Sherpas, running a Sherpa Trust which has brought them a number of small hospitals and schools, helped them to build bridges and adapt in general to a changing world.
Everest has held its fascination, attracting climbers from every climbing country in the world, to repeat the route made by the 1953 expedition or to try to find a new way to the highest point on earth. It is a focal point of adventure that draws the participant as much as the onlooker, through the irresistible attraction of its supreme height, in which the sense of discovery, the challenge of risk, the sheer beauty of what can be seen from so high and the drive of ego-satisfaction all play their parts.
– Chapter 9 –
Annapurna: South Face
Big wall climbing in the Himalaya, 1970
We projected the two-metre-square picture on to the wall of the living room and gazed and gazed – excited and then frightened. ‘There’s
a line all right,’ said Martin, ‘but it’s bloody big.’ The South Face of Annapurna – I don’t think I remember seeing a mountain photograph that has given such an impression of huge size and steepness. It was like four different Alpine faces piled one on top of the other – but what a line! Hard, uncompromising, positive all the way up. A squat snow ridge, like the buttress of a Gothic cathedral, leaned against the lower part of the wall. That was the start all right; perhaps one could bypass it by sneaking along the glacier at its foot – but what about avalanche risk? The buttress led to an ice ridge; even at the distance from which the photograph had been taken one could see it was a genuine knife-edge. I had climbed something like it before, on the South Face of Nuptse, the third peak of the Everest range – in places we had been able to look straight through the ridge, thirty metres below its crest. That had been frightening; this would be worse. The knife-edge died below a band of ice cliffs.
‘I wonder how stable they are?’ asked Nick.
I wondered too and traced a line through them with only partial confidence. And that led to a rock band.
‘Must be at least a thousand feet.’
‘But what altitude is it? Could be at 23,000 feet. Do you fancy some hard climbing at that height?’
‘What about that groove?’ It split the crest of the ridge, a huge gash, inviting, but undoubtedly more difficult and sustained than anything that had ever been climbed at that altitude.
The rock band ended with what seemed to be a shoulder of snow that led to the 8,091-metre summit. It was difficult to tell just how high the face was, but you could have fitted the North Wall of the Eiger into it two, perhaps even three, times. The expedition was barely conceived, and I don’t think any of us fully realised then the significance of what we were trying to do. The South Face of Annapurna was considerably steeper, bigger and obviously more difficult than anything that had hitherto been attempted in the Himalaya. Our decision to tackle it, first arrived at in autumn 1968, was part of a natural evolution, not only on a personal level but also within the broad development of Himalayan climbing. It is significant that around the same time groups of German and Japanese climbers, without any contact with ourselves or each other, were planning similar expeditions – the Germans, under Dr Karl Herrligkoffer, to the huge Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat, and the Japanese to the South-West Face of Everest.
I had been a member of two conventional Himalayan expeditions in 1960 and 1961, making the first ascents of Annapurna II (7,937 metres) and Nuptse (7,879 metres). This was very much part of the first wave of Himalayan climbing, when climbers were attempting first ascents of the myriad of unclimbed peaks. By 1969, however, the Himalaya was in the same state of development as the European Alps had been in the mid-nineteenth century, with most of the highest peaks achieved and climbers now turning their attention to the challenge of harder and harder routes. In the Alps there had been a gradual development of skills and techniques, enabling pioneers to climb successively more difficult ridges and then faces, slowly filling in all the gaps of unclimbed ground.
Inevitably, however, this gradual evolution was accelerated in the Himalaya where climbers had skills developed on the rock and ice of the Alps as a reference. For political reasons, the Himalaya had been closed to climbers from 1965 to 1969. Nick Estcourt, Martin Boysen and I had been talking about going off on an expedition somewhere – anywhere, probably to Alaska – when we heard that Nepal was going to open its frontiers once again. The selection of an objective was strongly influenced by my experience on Annapurna II and Nuptse. All the highest peaks in Nepal had been climbed, and although we could have gone for an unclimbed 7,500-metre one, I felt that this would have been a lesser experience than the peaks I had already climbed. A big unclimbed face, on the other hand, would give an altogether new dimension – the combination of a North Wall of the Eiger with all the problems of scale and altitude. At the time I did not stop to analyse my motives; it was more a gut feeling, a rejection of the familiar in favour of the new, unknown experience which, after all, is the very essence of adventure.
It was at this stage that I first saw a photo of the South Face of Annapurna and showed it to Martin Boysen and Nick Estcourt. During the following months the team grew as I began to put together the expedition. For me it was an adventure on two levels, both in terms of the mountain challenge and also grappling with the problems of organisation and leadership. I had never before led an expedition, had never considered myself to be the organising type. In fact, my lack of organisation was becoming a bad joke among my friends. I was unpunctual, forgetful and absent-minded. Although I had held a commission in the regular army, my military career was hardly distinguished. I had detested all the administrative jobs that I had been given as a junior officer and one commanding officer had even refused to recommend me for the almost automatic promotion to captain because of my poor personal administration – there were never enough lamp bulbs in the barrack room I was responsible for.
And now I was trying to organise and lead the largest and most complex expedition since the 1953 Everest expedition. Some of my antecedents might have been similar to those of John Hunt – we had at least both been to Sandhurst, but there is a vast difference between commanding a brigade in battle and misdirecting a troop of three tanks on army manoeuvres in North Germany. However, I did have the experience I had gained both on hard Alpine climbs and also in the past few years when I had earned a living as a freelance writer and photographer, joining projects like Blashford-Snell’s Blue Nile expedition and going off to Baffin Island in the middle of winter to hunt with the Eskimos. It had taught me to be more organised in myself and also to understand how the media worked, a thing that was essential if you wanted to finance an expedition.
There were many moments in the months of preparation when I knew a blank despair, either appalled by organisational mistakes I had made, by personality problems or, most of all, by the fear of the whole thing being a complete flop. After all, we had only seen a photograph of the face. We had been given the sponsorship of the Mount Everest Foundation, we would have a TV team with us, every move would be reported. What if the route proved impossibly dangerous, if it were swept by avalanche so that we could barely make a start on the face? Could I really control and co-ordinate this group of talented, strong and at times bloody-minded individuals?
I had finally settled on a team of eleven, of whom eight were hard climbers, each with the ability and drive to reach the summit, and three with more of a support role. Of the eleven I knew eight extremely well; we had climbed together, knew each other’s ways, strengths and weaknesses. At the same time, though, there were elements of stress within the make-up of the team, a factor that was perhaps inevitable and even useful as a spur and irritant that was to be important later on. Undoubtedly the most experienced member of the party was Don Whillans, the tough, stocky ex-plumber from Manchester who, with Joe Brown, had revolutionised British rock climbing in the early 1950s. I had had some of my best climbing with Don. Of all the people I have climbed with, Don had the best mountain judgement and, at his peak in the early 1960s, the greatest climbing ability. We had got on well in our two seasons in the Alps mainly, I suspect, because I had been prepared to yield to his judgement; it was Don who undoubtedly had the initiative in our relationship. Through the rest of the 1960s our paths rarely crossed. Don had seemed to have lost interest in rock climbing on his home crags, had little interest, even in the Alps. He had been on an expedition to Gauri Sankar in 1965 and had climbed in North America, but lack of exercise and a fondness for his pint while at home in Britain had given him an impressive gut. I had had serious reservations about inviting him to join the expedition; knew that there would be a tension between us but, at the same time, felt sure that once he got going he had a judgement and drive that would increase our chances of success.
The feeling was mutual, Don commented in an article after our return:
‘Chris has developed from an easy-going, generous, haphazard
lieutenant in the army to a high-powered, materialistic photo-journalist, to all outward appearances motivated only by money. (Chris believes we must tell the truth about each other regardless of feelings, as long as he is doing the telling!) However, I knew him well enough to know that when the crunch point is reached his sense of proportion always returns to more normal standards, so I had no real decision to make about accepting his offer.’
The others were easier choices. The only other member of the team who had been to the Himalaya was Ian Clough, who had climbed the Central Pillar of Frêney with Don and myself and had been with me on the Eiger and with Don on Gauri Sankar. Warm-hearted, unselfish and easy-going, Ian was both a brilliant and a very safe climber, as well as being a perfect member of any team. Of the newcomers to the Himalaya, Dougal Haston was undoubtedly the strongest. A quiet, introverted Scot, he had a single-minded drive that had taken him to the top of the North Wall of the Eiger by its direct route and had already established him as Britain’s most outstanding young climber. Mick Burke from Wigan had a very similar background to Whillans, the same dry Lancashire humour, and a readiness to speak his mind. The two frequently clashed. Martin Boysen was a brilliant rock climber, easy-going, indolent but completely committed to climbing. He and I had had many delightful days’ climbing on British crags but had never been together further afield. I had also climbed a lot with Nick Estcourt, a steady rock climber and very experienced alpinist. He was a computer programmer by profession and, unlike many of his fellow climbers, understood the need for systematic planning. He always saw my problems in trying to organise an expedition and gave me a steady, loyal support throughout our expeditioning.
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