The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  For the rest of his short life, the catastrophe hung over Mallory’s spirit like a black cloud. And in a perverse way, it contributed to his determination to go back to Everest once more and settle the score.

  • • •

  It would take almost two years for the Everest Committee to launch a third expedition. Thanks to massive debts racked up by the first two ventures, Mallory and others had to go on tour lecturing about the great adventure. In early 1923, Mallory launched a long and dispiriting circuit of the United States, appearing often before half-packed houses and apathetic audiences. To conduct the tour, he not only had to take a leave from his job teaching at the Cambridge University extension school, he had to spend months away from his beloved wife, Ruth, and his three equally beloved children.

  It was during this tour that Mallory uttered the four-word phrase that has became the most famous quotation in mountaineering history. In New York City in March, a reporter asked him why anyone would want to climb Everest. “Because it is there,” Mallory shot back.

  Ever since, mountaineers have treasured that answer as embodying a profound and mystical truth, with all the riddling paradox of a Zen koan. Yet some who knew Mallory well, including his biographer David Pye, heard it as a throwaway dismissal of a clueless journalist, uttered by a man exasperated by audiences that could not grasp the stirring magnitude of the quest for Everest. In either case, the quip has won its immortality.

  In early March 1924, the team sailed for India. Back from the 1922 expedition were not only Mallory, but Norton, Somervell, and Geoffrey Bruce. Rounding out the roster were seven other climbers, two of whom—Noel Odell and Andrew Irvine—would play pivotal roles in the assault. Once more, General Charles Bruce was the elderly expedition leader, but when he contracted malaria on the hike in, he was replaced by Norton, as Mallory took over Norton’s role as climbing leader.

  During the months of lecture touring and brooding upon the previous failures and the tragedy of the seven Sherpa deaths, Mallory gradually became obsessed with Everest. In my book about Annapurna, The Will to Climb, I tried to distinguish between commitment and obsession in mountaineering. Over the years, I’ve come to see that it would be simplistic to regard commitment as a good and necessary thing, obsession as its evil mirror image. They’re really points along a continuum. But even when Annapurna came to haunt my thoughts every day, as I wondered if I could ever get to the summit of my last 8,000er, I never allowed myself to become obsessed with the mountain.

  Nor will I flat-out declare that obsession is always a mistake in climbing. Jean-Christophe Lafaille, the most gifted partner I ever roped up with, had become obsessed with Annapurna after it killed his mentor, Pierre Béghin, in 1992, and nearly killed him. That’s why J.-C. pushed on along the east ridge in 2002, while I turned back. He had always been willing to cut the margin of safety thinner than I was, and technically, he was a better climber than I was (or than almost anyone in the world on 8,000-meter peaks). When J.-C. disappeared on a solo attempt on Makalu in 2006, it was not obsession per se that killed him. Although his actual fate has never been learned, I’ve always thought it most likely that he fell into a crevasse. J.-C. was climbing toward the summit, alone and therefore unroped on glacial terrain. No amount of skill can save you from breaking through a snow bridge and dying in the depths of a crevasse.

  As he set off for Everest in the spring of 1924, Mallory’s thoughts were contradictory. One side of him was brimming with optimism. From a village on the hike in, he wrote to Ruth, “I can’t see myself coming down defeated.” And to his former teammate, Tom Longstaff—the same partner who had criticized Mallory’s decision to climb back up to the North Col in bad avalanche conditions—“We’re going to sail to the top this time, and God with us—or stamp to the top with our teeth in the wind.”

  The other side of Mallory was almost fatalistic. To his friend Geoffrey Keynes, before even leaving England, he wrote, “This is going to be more like war than mountaineering. I don’t expect to come back.” (There’s more than a whiff of obsession in that enigmatic statement.)

  In his 2011 book, Into the Silence, Wade Davis makes an interesting connection between war and climbing. Virtually all the members of the 1924 expedition had served on the front in World War I, and, like all their fellow soldiers, had been shattered by the experience. (Mallory’s mentor, Geoffrey Winthrop Young, lost a leg in the war, but continued to climb for decades thereafter.) Davis’s argument is that in the wake of the horrors of the war, from friends killed in the trenches to comrades felled by mustard gas, Everest came to figure for the British as “a symbol of national redemption and hope.”

  Mallory’s own experience in the war was both scarifying and disappointing. On the front in France in 1916 and 1917, he had his share of close calls and saw friends shot to death beside him. But in May 1917, with the battlefield at its most intense, he was invalided home, on account of a bad ankle that had never healed after a climbing accident suffered eight years earlier. Although he never said so, Mallory may have felt a lasting guilt about not serving through the end of the war, when some of his closest friends (including the poet Rupert Brooke) gave their lives in doing so. And that, in turn, may have fueled his obsession with Everest.

  On April 29, the team reached its base camp at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier. All during the hike in, the members had been suffused with confidence. Norton wrote, “I doubt if so strong a party will ever again be got together to climb Mount Everest.”

  But at the Rongbuk Monastery, the team received a stunning psychological blow. The head lama, pleading illness, declined to perform the puja—the ceremony blessing the climbers about to attack the mountain, intended to ensure their protection by the gods. Even today, almost ninety years later, a puja is required before we set foot on Everest. For the Sherpas, the ceremony means that they are “preblessed” in the event that tragedy befalls them during the climb. For me, it feels as though we Westerners are giving respect to the mountain and showing our humility. And the puja sets a good tone for approaching the mountain cautiously.

  At the Rongbuk Monastery in 1924, moreover, any hope that the disaster of 1922 had been forgiven was dashed. There the climbers saw a freshly painted mural depicting the Sherpas’ deaths. In the words of one member, the mural depicted “the party being pitch-forked down the mountain-side by hoofed devils and sent spinning into the colder hell.”

  As they started up the East Rongbuk Glacier, it was obvious to the climbers that the loyal Sherpas were badly spooked. One of them, Angtarkay, had been dug out of the debris in 1922. Now he suffered something like a mental breakdown on the approach march, and never set foot on the glacier.

  The Buddhist maledictions of the monastery seemed to come to fruition in one setback after another. Storm followed storm, the temperatures were unfathomably low, and the snow conditions were atrocious. Stronger than the 1922 team this party of eleven Britons certainly was, but the weakness of Sherpa support clogged the logistics, and the campaign was soon drastically behind schedule.

  Mallory had planned May 17 as the summit day. But with all the snafus, it was not until May 20 that he and three partners first struggled through to reach the North Col. More storms followed, in one of which four Tibetan porters got stranded overnight. It was not until June 1 that enough gear and food had been carried to Camp IV on the col to allow the first party to head upward. The monsoon might arrive any day.

  So far, Noel Odell had proven himself to be, along with Mallory and Norton, one of the three strongest climbers. The wild card was Odell’s twenty-two-year-old protégé, Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, still an Oxford undergraduate. Though he was a champion oarsman for the university eight, Irvine had precious little mountaineering experience of any kind. His great talent, however, was as a tinkerer with gear, in which capacity he was something of a genius. That skill, most observers have concluded, was what made Mallory choose Irvine rather than Odell as partner for his own summit attempt. By now, completely won over to
the use of oxygen apparatus, Mallory, with his mechanical ineptitude, needed an Irvine to solve all the glitches the complicated and ill-designed tanks and respirators posed.

  On June 1, Mallory and Geoffrey Bruce led eight Sherpas up the slopes from the North Col, hoping to establish a Camp V somewhere on the down-sloping shelves at 25,300 feet. Only Mallory and four of the Sherpas completed the vital trip, as Bruce, who had “strained his heart,” led the other four back to the col. After that push, Bruce was finished for the expedition.

  On June 2, Norton and Somervell, with the six gamest Sherpas, set out on a three-day attempt to reach the top, predicated on establishing a Camp VI higher on the slope. The Sherpas, unwilling to continue, were sent down at various stages, but by the evening of June 3, Norton and Somervell were ensconced in a shakily pitched tent at 26,800 feet.

  They got off at 6:40 a.m. on June 4. Remarkably, both men were climbing without bottled oxygen. For several days, Somervell had been afflicted by coughing fits—much like the ones we experienced in 1987, but, as it would turn out, far more serious in Somervell’s case. Norton took the lead all day. At 27,000 feet, they reached the foot of the Yellow Band. Here, instead of climbing to the crest of the northeast ridge, Norton chose to move diagonally rightward toward a couloir he saw in the distance (the Great or Norton Couloir, as it would come to be named). The going was dicey, across slippery, downward-sloping plates of rock interspersed with hard snow.

  At noon, Somervell could go no farther. He waited as Norton forged on, traversing at the very top of the Yellow Band. Crossing increasingly treacherous ground, Norton reached the near edge of the couloir, but he knew that was his limit. Just as they had with Mallory in 1922, Norton and Somervell had imposed upon themselves a sane turnaround deadline of 2:00 p.m.

  The team would later calculate Norton’s high point as 28,126 feet, only 909 feet below the summit. No one will ever be able to say for sure, but it is possible that Norton reached an altitude higher than anyone else would climb for the next twenty-eight years. Without bottled oxygen, his was a magnificent achievement.

  On the way back to the North Col, Somervell suffered his worst coughing fit of the whole expedition. It ended, to his horror, when he coughed up an explosion of blood and mucus that he later learned was the lining of his larynx.

  The 1924 expedition might well have ended now, with a new world altitude record and no loss of life. But still the monsoon held off. On June 6, Mallory started up from the North Col with Sandy Irvine, using bottled oxygen, accompanied by eight lightly burdened Sherpas. The next day, Noel Odell and a Sherpa climbed to Camp V, crossing paths with the Sherpas headed down. One of them handed Odell a note from Mallory, written at Camp VI at 26,800 feet. Its jaunty tone camouflaged the dire news that he and Irvine had lost their cook stove when it “rolled down the slope.” Without the stove, it would be impossible to melt snow for drinking water, making the summit push all the more arduous.

  Odell spent the night alone at Camp V, while the Sherpas descended on their own to the North Col. The sunset and night were sublimely beautiful, “an ineffable transcendent experience,” he later wrote, “that can never fade from memory.” As he set out on the morning of June 8 to push on solo to Camp VI, Odell had “no qualms for Mallory and Irvine’s progress upward.” The sky had been clear at dawn, but now clouds rolled in.

  Remarkably acclimatized and in his solitary element, Odell, a geologist by profession, wandered from ledge to ledge, marveling at rock bands in which he found ancient fossils. At 12:50 p.m., he surmounted a “little crag.” The clouds briefly cleared. On the ridge stretching above him, he spotted two tiny figures, one following the other, as they climbed a snow slope leading to “what seemed to me to be the last step but one from the final pyramid. . . . I could see that they were moving expeditiously as if endeavouring to make up for lost time.”

  Then the clouds closed in. Odell’s is one of the most legendary last sightings in exploration history.

  The man reached Camp VI by mid-afternoon. In the tent, he was disturbed to find pieces of oxygen apparatus strewn about, as if Irvine had attempted desperate last-minute adjustments to the balky gear. And he found a flashlight that the perpetually absentminded Mallory had accidentally left behind. Odell scrambled 200 feet above camp, whistling and yodeling in hopes of an answer from his friends. Then he descended all the way to the North Col.

  By now, all the other members of the expedition were out of commission in terms of supporting the summit pair. Ever hopeful, in an incredible performance, Odell climbed once again back up to Camp V on June 9, then to Camp VI on the tenth. But there, his worst fears were confirmed. The tent was just as he had left it two days before. Mallory and Irvine could not still be alive. They had vanished into the mists of Everest, and of history.

  With a heavy heart, Odell laid two sleeping bags out on the snow in the shape of a T—the prearranged signal to his teammates watching from below through a telescope that the worst had happened.

  • • •

  The great question in everybody’s minds, not only in 1924 but for decades afterward, was whether Mallory and Irvine might have reached the summit before perishing. Odell believed they could have. In 1933, on the first expedition to Everest after the 1924 venture, Percy Wyn Harris found an ice axe lying on a slab of rock some 250 feet short of what climbers have come to call the First Step on the northeast ridge—thus considerably below where Odell last spotted Mallory and Irvine. Obviously the axe belonged to one of the two men, but what was it doing there? Had Mallory or Irvine laid it down momentarily to attend to some other task, just before disaster struck, or had one of them somehow dropped it during a fall? And if so, on the way up the mountain, or on the descent?

  On May 29, 1953, when Edmund Hillary set foot on the summit of Everest to notch its first verifiable ascent, the first thing he did was to peer down the opposite, north side of the mountain to look for any signs of Mallory and Irvine. He found none, but twenty-nine years had intervened.

  In 1999, twelve years after he and I had come so agonizingly close to summitting on Everest, Eric Simonson led a team to the mountain to search the upper zone of the eastern part of the north face for any signs of the climbers who had vanished seventy-five years before. And on May 1, Conrad Anker made one of the most stunning discoveries of twentieth-century exploration, as he found Mallory’s body in a shallow basin just below 27,000 feet. The corpse, miraculously preserved by the cold and dry air, lay facedown. Mallory’s fingers were still planted into the slope, as if he had tried to arrest his fall with his bare hands. His right leg was badly fractured, and in his dying moments Mallory had laid his other leg on top of it, as if to protect it from further damage. A braided cotton rope was tied to Mallory’s waist, but the line had severed about ten feet from the body.

  My co-author, David Roberts, wrote a book with Conrad about the discovery and about Mallory. In The Lost Explorer, Conrad meticulously examined the question of whether the two men might have reached the summit on June 8, 1924. His conclusion: almost certainly not.

  Conrad’s argument was a model of careful, sound reasoning. The body lay at a point on the face almost directly below where Harris had found the ice axe in 1933, suggesting a scenario in which, roped together, one of the men fell, the other dropped his axe to belay, both were pulled off the mountain, and the rope broke in the fall. (A tantalizing sidebar to the whole scenario is that a Chinese climber, Wang Hangbao, may have discovered Irvine’s body in 1975, only twenty minutes from his expedition’s Camp VI, near 27,000 feet. Wang himself was killed in an avalanche before he could guide Western investigators to the “old English dead,” as he described the body. Subsequent searches in the area have come up empty.)

  The clincher for Conrad, though, was the notorious Second Step, a ninety-foot-high cliff at 28,240 feet on the northeast ridge that Mallory himself had recognized as the most serious obstacle on the route he hoped to follow to the top. (By traversing into the Great Couloir on June 4, 1924, Nor
ton was avoiding coming to grips with the Second Step.)

  In 1999, sixteen days after finding Mallory’s body, Conrad Anker and Dave Hahn climbed the northeast ridge to the summit. Since 1975, when a Chinese expedition had bolted a ladder in place on the crux stretch of the Second Step, all climbers on that route have climbed the ladder rather than the rock and ice beneath it. On May 17, Conrad tried to free-climb the Step without using the ladder. It took a desperate effort, and he felt that he had compromised his “experiment” by having to step on one rung of the ladder to get his crampon-shod foot onto a wrinkle of rock beside it. Conrad rated the pitch at 5.10—harder, probably, than anything Mallory (or any other Brit) had climbed even on the crags of Great Britain by 1924.

  In 2007, Conrad returned to Everest as the lead climber playing the role of Mallory in a film called The Wildest Dream, which had been inspired by The Lost Explorer. This time Conrad got permission from the Chinese authorities to remove the ladder temporarily while the film crew shot him attempting a genuine free ascent of the Second Step. Again it took a monumental effort, including a slip that Conrad caught by grabbing a cam he had placed in a crack. He got up the Step, to the cheers of his teammates and the film crew. And again, he rated the pitch as 5.10.

  In The Lost Explorer, Conrad allowed the possibility that Mallory, climbing at his most brilliant or perhaps finding the Second Step unusually clogged with snow, making it easier, might have led the pitch free. But the clincher in Conrad’s argument was that, had Mallory and Irvine climbed the Second Step, they would have had to descend it on the way back, to reach the point from which Mallory fell off the northeast ridge. It would have been impossible to down-climb such a pitch (let alone in the dark, without the flashlight Mallory had left in the tent). Instead, the men would have had to rappel the cliff. But there is no good place to fix an anchor above the Step, and no trace of any rappel gear from 1924 has ever been found in the vicinity.