Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine

by Julie Summers

  Up to this point the expedition had enjoyed the relative comfort of the boat which was warm, dry and they had had access to good food. Despite sea sickness during the first few days and the broken aerial, everything else had gone very much to plan. Their luck changed when they arrived at Whalenberg Bay which they found to be blocked with ice and plans for landing for their journey into North East Land were frustrated. Anchored just north of the Eastern Foster Isles, they discovered, however, that they could land on the New Friesland side just south of Cape Duym. Sandy and Odell left the boat after lunch to reconnoitre and returned convinced this would be a good place for the sledging party to land. That afternoon, July 30, they made their landing on the ice, using an unreliable and faulty motorboat to ferry the sledges and stores to the shore. Before they finally set off they returned to the sloop for a dinner of eider duck and reindeer and were then rowed ashore towards midnight by Binney and Geoffrey Summers, who took a cine-film of the landing.

  They set up camp not far from the landing spot and went to bed in glorious sunshine at 4.15 a.m. There were four of them in the sledging party: Odell as geologist, Frazer as surveyor and Geoffrey Milling and Sandy as cooks, assistants, camp secretaries and for providing the often required brute strength.

  Although August is deemed to be the best month for getting to Spitsbergen from the point of view of the accessibility through the pack ice, it is a notoriously bad time of year for mist. On the positive side, there is sun for almost twenty-four hours a day, so the expedition could make use of the clearer night-time sunshine and sleep through the mistier daytime light.

  Odell, Milling and Frazer sitting on an expedition sledge

  For the first ten days of the journey they worked and travelled by night and slept during the day to get the best of the weather. During the day the mist and fog tended to descend and made their survey work as well as their travel difficult. By night, as the temperature dropped, the mist would clear and they would have bright light by which to trek and work. The camp had to be set up each ‘evening’ and struck each day after breakfast, and to begin with this process took several hours until they got themselves organized. They had two sledges each weighing over 500 lb to which were lashed boxes of food, equipment, two tents plus a spare, sleeping bags, clothes, cookers, skis, crampons and cameras. At the outset they used crampons to walk on the snow and ice. A crampon is a device that fixes to the bottom of a boot for walking on hard-packed snow and ice. In the 1920s the crampon was made of two articulated metal plates that attached to the underside of the boot by means of leather straps. The front plate had six or eight spikes about 3 to 4 centimetres long and the back plate four spikes. They were a fiddle to put on and had to be accurately fitted to the boots for maximum effect. One of Sandy’s jobs on the boat had been to see that each sledge party member had crampons that fitted and to ensure that ski bindings were correctly adjusted to their ski boots.

  He quickly took responsibility for overseeing that the supplies were checked, that all the equipment was kept in working order and the tents were properly erected each day. He made long lists in his notebook detailing the exact contents of the food boxes, so that if they decided to leave one sledge behind and proceed with the other, as they did on several occasions, they would not find themselves without anything vital. He seems to have succeeded as nowhere in the diaries is there any complaint about a lack of pemmican or raisins. He was frustrated, however, by several defects in the equipment they had and made a list in the front of his notebook for future expeditions to include socks that don’t shrink and felt for under his sleeping bag.

  They were living off a diet of pemmican and dried fruit, with biscuits for pudding. Geoffrey Milling was put in charge of the cooking and he took on this often unpleasant task without complaint. Water was no problem for them but snow had to be melted if they were unable to find a camp site by a stream. When they were confined to their tents by wind or snow they would take it in turns to crawl out of the tents, collect snow, fire up the cooker and prepare food and drink for the others.

  After the first few of days they realized that their progress on foot with crampons was slow. Both the sledges had sails and they tried erecting the sails and using the wind to help them cover ground more efficiently, but the going was rough and the ice ‘hummocky’ which meant that the only real method of progress was to pull the sledges behind them. Sandy wrote in his diary that the worst aspect of pulling the sledges in the early part of the journey was the fact that the ice had melted in the sun and the ground was very wet underfoot with frequent morasses or bogs; ‘Exceedingly heavy going in soft snow & bad hummocks with sledge constantly bogged down made progress very slow … all the glaciers look very black & many morasses kept our feet very wet & cold.’ Odell also noted the bad going and wrote: ‘Our Shackelton canvas boots let the water in badly and proved quite useless for this part of the journey over lower glaciers.’ If the sun didn’t come out when they set up camp it meant that they had to put on wet socks and boots the following day. When the weather was bright, however, they could hang their clothes out to dry and the camp quickly took on the look of a shambolic laundry room with boots hanging from the skis, underwear on the guy ropes and socks strung between the tents.

  Despite the discomfort they were experiencing the mood of the party was cheerful. Both Odell and Frazer were rewarded regularly with excellent finds for their geological and survey work. The views were breathtaking, when the mist cleared, and even Sandy, whose diary style is economical at best, allowed himself the occasional outburst at the wonder of the scenery: ‘We left the sledge out in the glacier & climbed the summit we had chosen by a very steep scree slope. The view from the top was marvellous with the sun close to the horizon & a wonderful Alpine glow on all the snow summits.’ Whenever they spilt up into pairs to work Odell and Sandy would team up for the geological study, while Milling and Frazer concentrated on the survey work, often disappearing for hours on end up to some summit to photograph and take aneroid readings of the landscape.

  After a few days of hiking on crampons, Odell decided that the party would be altogether more efficient on skis. Neither Sandy nor Milling had ever stood on skis before, but Odell and Frazer were proficient and encouraged them to try. The first few attempts ended in much hilarity and a considerable amount of wet clothing as Milling and Sandy floundered and tumbled whenever the slope went even gently downhill. But they soon got the measure of their skis and both made forays off from camp on more than one occasion just for the sheer pleasure of ski running. Their skis were very long by today’s standards, about 230 centimetres and were made of hickory, so that they were light and flexible. The ‘binding’ or fitting for the boot consisted of a very basic leather strap that was attached to the front of an aluminium plate on the middle of the ski. The heel of the foot was free. The leather straps were relatively strong but Sandy had to carry out running repairs on the skis throughout the trek. Milling, particularly, had problems with broken straps which was both frustrating and potentially dangerous. I found Sandy’s Spitsbergen skis and although they look basic they are remarkably light and still flexible, despite having spent the last seventy odd years in a disused squash court. When climbing on skis they attached seal skins whose hairs prevented the skis from sliding backwards. Nowadays skins are artificial and are stuck to the bottom of a ski with very sticky glue. In Spitsbergen they had to tie the skins to the skis using thin rope which meant that if they were not tight they would slip off which could be rather off-putting on a difficult piece of snow.

  Early on they made the most significant geological find - a lake with a strange feature which Odell described in his diary: ‘From this point was visible another lake across a low ice-col to east of lake (drained) and on the surface of its waters Sandy noticed a whirlpool with the water churned up in great commotion and several smaller ones.’ Odell realized that the whirlpool marked the outlet of the drainage from beneath the ice col and the lake above: ‘The distance between the two lakes
was about 1.5 miles and accounted for the great pressure of the water, which caused the whirlpool. The lake drained out into a rushing river, which ran into the Hinlopen strait.’ Sandy and Frazer took photographs and Binney later hailed this discovery as one of the most important of the Spitsbergen expedition.

  The weather was very erratic and after 150 hours of glorious sunshine the snow on the neighbouring glacier had melted leaving the snow in a very sticky condition which made progress slow. They had hoped to reach the rock carpet, which would afford dryer conditions, but were unpleasantly surprised to find some very deep morass into which Odell and Sandy fell waist-deep. As they were both wearing their skis they could do little but flounder around until Milling and Frazer arrived to pull them out. Soaked through and extremely cold they pitched their camp on the snow and spent a very cold, wet night in their sleeping bags.

  The following day started well enough. They were trekking towards the rock carpet and saw, as the mist cleared, their way across the heavily crevassed glacier to their goal. The colours of the rock cliffs varied from pinks and greys to browns and blacks. Odell was in his element and he and Sandy made copious notes about the rock formations until the mist came down again and they were obliged to resume their journey. They had found a flat spot to camp and decided to return for the second sledge which they had left some four miles back.

  During the long return for the second sledge, it came on to snow very thickly and it was not until 7.30 that Milling sighted it as we were moving extended out in line owing to the snowy atmosphere. After struggling through the very worst morassed ground plastered with sticky wet snow, we were obliged, owing to very bad clogging of the sledge and our skis to leave it again at 9 and make our way back the remaining 3 or 4 miles with the very worst of sticky snow obliging us to walk a good deal of the way.

  It took Sandy and Odell two and a half hours to get back to the camp. Frazer returned an hour later and Geoffrey Milling, who had broken a ski strap, finally limped into camp at 1.30 a.m., four and a half hours after they had abandoned the sledge.

  The matter of the marooned sledge was of great concern to the party, particularly to Odell who was at a loss as to see how it could be rescued. While he and Frazer continued with their survey work, Milling and Sandy made their way back through the morass to the site of the stricken sledge. Odell recorded the mission: ‘As a day could be saved by their doing so, Sandy and Geoffrey went off back beyond Camp 5 and spent a desperately strenuous day bringing No. 2 sledge up to Camp 6. The snow was fearfully sticky and the sledge sank deeply in: they took 4 ½ hrs in bringing it in, and were thoroughly tired out.’ It was this superhuman effort, more than any other, which convinced Odell that Sandy would prove to be a useful member of the Mount Everest expedition. He had shown not only ingenuity but also brute strength and persistence. He used this example in his recommendations to the Mount Everest Committee, pointing out that he really did not know how the two of them had achieved it. Sandy, with characteristic understatement, noted: ‘After a very heavy day’s work we got the sledge back but felt that we never wanted to see the damn thing again.’ Milling explained the rescue effort in more detail. They had found it impossible to pull the sledge on skis and even on foot as the runners had sunk too deep in the soft snow but in the end at Sandy’s suggestion they placed their own skis under the sledge between the runners, thus converting it into a Canadian sledge. His solution worked but even so they had an awful struggle to get home on foot and finally arrived at 9.30 p.m. (four and a half hours solid straining). ‘Going up the hills was very hard work indeed. We were both very tired when we got in.’

  As Milling and Sandy struggled with the sledge, Frazer and Odell set off on their own to continue their scientific work. They climbed up the glacier above Camp 6 and were rewarded with a marvellous view of Mount Tchernychev, the mountain first scaled and thus named by the Russian expedition of some thirty years earlier, and one of their goals. From there they could see a range of peaks and to identify three other geodetic beacons, Mount Loven, Black Mountain and Thumb Point ‘and so by resection established our position beyond question from the survey panoram. Photogs: this was a great coup!’

  A camp on Spitsbergen, Sandy’s socks and boots hanging out to dry

  The following day Odell and Frazer caught up on their sleep while Sandy and Milling checked the stores. They were half-way through their journey and felt so confident in their supplies that they celebrated the reclaiming of the No. 2 sledge and Odell and Frazer’s survey work of the previous day by opening their only pot of marmalade. That afternoon they succeeded in making the wireless work and were able to pick up Relf’s time signal from the Terningen. A corner had been turned in more ways than one and they all felt pleased with their various achievements.

  At the next camp there was a little excitement in the form of a friendly Arctic fox that was nosing around the sledges when Odell woke the following morning. Sandy was dispatched to the sledge where he collected his rifle and shot the poor creature. He and Milling then spent a mucky half-hour skinning it which turned out to be a far more difficult task than either had anticipated. Milling was excited and thought that the fur would be valuable and insisted that they should keep it to sell when they got back to Norway. In the absence of any materials with which to cure the skin it soon began to smell dreadfully and had to be jettisoned. Milling, chef extraordinaire, cooked the foxed but succeeded in persuading only Odell to eat it with him. Frazer and Sandy turned up their noses at it and preferred to stick to the pemmican.

  On 16 August Frazer and Milling climbed Mount Newton, the highest peak in Spitsbergen, standing some 5880ft above sea level. The same day Sandy and Odell took a different route and climbed an unnamed peak that had an imposing 1800ft rock precipice which they proceeded to scale, reaching the 5500ft summit after ‘some pitches of considerable difficulty’. All in all they had had about 2800ft of rock climbing. Odell, had an encyclopaedic memory for climbs from the past, was quick to compare the climb with the Tower Ridge on Ben Nevis. ‘The view from the top in every direction was stupendous, but above all generally to the westward where close at hand lay the group of rocky towers and summits: one huge rock peak rose steeply to a sharp gendarmed spitze, in appearance very like the Italian side of the Matterhorn, and looking impregnable from the east side … The scene was as fine as any amongst the higher Alps.’ The descent was via a steep snowfield, down over several hundred feet of easy rock and then along a steep ice precipice to the slope at the bottom of which they had left their skis.

  At Mount Tchernychev they discovered that the maps the Russians had prepared during their survey work were inaccurate. Frazer was pleased to be able to correct these and took a series of photographs for his survey under ideal conditions. Odell was keen to visit the site of the Russian geodetic survey so the four of them climbed up to the beacon where they found part of an iron Russian flag which had blown down. They kept the fragment as a souvenir deeming it to be irreplaceable. Sandy found a case with a max/min thermometer, which recorded a minimum temperature of –38.6° C. The max. column was broken so they couldn’t accurately determine the maximum temperature. They also found a copy of a Russian newspaper from March 1901 and some other news sheets. They replaced the thermometer and newspaper and left their own message which read: ‘Visited by the Topographical party of the Merton College (Oxford) Expedition’ which they each signed and dated. They were the first visitors to the site since it was set up by the Russian Arc of Meridian Expedition in 1901.

  All this time they were receiving radio messages from the Terningen which was now about seventy miles away from their current site. They had eight days to make the journey which they judged to be about enough time to cover the distance. They set off from Mount Tchernychev in high spirits finding a campsite that evening on a piece of moraine opposite the Oxford Glacier, which had been the focus of the 1921 Spitsbergen survey, and named one of its tributaries the Merton Glacier and the bay formed by its base Merton Bay.


  The weather, however, had turned dramatically and they were buffeted by hurricane winds and blizzards for two days and three nights that kept them pinned in their tents. It gave Frazer and Odell the opportunity to write up their notes but Milling and Sandy became increasingly concerned about the distance they still had to cover before they met up with the Terningen. During the time they were holed up they exchanged stories of past adventures. Odell had a fund of wonderful tales which amused and impressed them all. He was a great raconteur and told many stories of his Alpine adventures. He then related an incident when he and Mona had been walking in North Wales a few years earlier and had encountered an intrepid young motorcyclist who had asked them the way to Llanfairfechan. Sandy recognized himself in the story and produced from his pocket his wallet with the press cutting to back it up. When they had recovered from their mirth, and with their fund of tales now exhausted, Odell began to talk about the forthcoming Mount Everest expedition of which he was a member. He found a very willing audience, particularly in Sandy, who pumped him for information and details on everything he could think of. Odell had only recently returned from a couple of days in North Wales with Percy Unna, when they had tested the proposed design for the 1924 oxygen apparatus. Sandy was immediately fascinated and he and Odell spent hours discussing the oxygen apparatus. He made sketches in his notebook of details of the valves and flowmeters that were evidently presenting problems. He made several useful suggestions and it must have dawned on Odell that Sandy would be just the man to have helping him the with oxygen. His strength, resilience and good humour had been tested to the limit over the last few weeks, so on that count he was well suited, but more importantly, from Odell’s point of view, he was clearly something of a mechanical genius and would be able to take over the responsibility for the capricious apparatus.