by Ed Viesturs
During the expedition, the sole Indian member, Harsh Bahuguna, died of exhaustion hanging on a fixed rope as he tried futilely to unclip his carabiner to pass an anchor. At the end of two months of sporadic but dedicated effort, Whillans and Haston established a high camp at 27,200 feet. But bad weather defeated any chance of climbing above. Nor did the expedition succeed on the direct West Ridge. Because the venture had basked in such monumental publicity beforehand, the reaction afterward was savage. In Mountain, Ken Wilson, the self-styled arbiter of everything to do with climbing, wrote, “For a public and press weaned on mountaineering success, this year’s failure on Everest was unacceptable.”
At around 26,000 feet, a crux decision faced all the parties trying the Southwest Face. To circumvent the rock band that swept across the upper face, the two Japanese attempts had angled left, hoping to find a passage through a narrow, dangerous gully to reach the highest snowfield of all. Instead, Whillans and Haston had headed right, gradually ascending hundreds of feet of snow ramp as their route angled toward the southeast ridge, first pioneered by Hillary and Tenzing. They were confident that this right-hand ramp would solve the puzzle of the face. But above the high camp, savage cliffs of black rock offered no obvious line, although Haston thought that a snow-choked chimney might go.
At this point Chris Bonington took up the gauntlet. In the autumn of 1972, he led a thirteen-man British team to the Southwest Face. Back was Dougal Haston, abetted by such strong mountaineers as Mick Burke, Hamish MacInnes, Nick Estcourt, and Doug Scott. But the predictable problem of a postmonsoon attempt on Everest took its toll. It was not until early November that the team regained the high camp first pitched by Haston and Whillans in 1971. By then, it was bitterly cold, and the weather stayed fierce day after day. In addition, the snow chimney that Haston had put his hopes on had morphed into “nearly 1000 feet of very difficult rock.” Haston tried to reconnoiter an “escape route” rightward toward the southeast ridge, but in 100-m.p.h. winds, he had to turn back.
In the fall of 1973, yet another Japanese expedition tried the face, only to be defeated at the same high point.
Thus the Southwest Face had repelled five major expeditions, including some of the best high-altitude mountaineers in the world. It was indeed becoming a Last Great Problem of the Himalaya.
• • •
For Dougal Haston, the Southwest Face had become a personal nemesis. And for Chris Bonington, who was fast establishing himself at age forty-one as the most successful of all expedition leaders in the Himalaya, with triumphs on Annapurna’s South Face and Changabang on his résumé, the face was the kind of challenge he loved to sink his teeth into.
In 1975, Bonington put together a team almost as massive and expensive as the AMEE. Haston, Burke, Estcourt, MacInnes, and Scott were back, reinforced by excellent climbers such as Martin Boysen, “Tut” Braithwaite, and Peter Boardman. Only twenty-four, Boardman was signing up for his first Himalayan expedition, but he already had first ascents in the Hindu Kush, the Caucasus, the Alps, and Alaska under his belt. He would go on to become one of the greatest of all high-altitude climbers before his untimely death at age thirty-one, as he attempted an even more difficult route on Everest.
The burgeoning expenses of a team comprising eighteen climbers, forty-one high-altitude Sherpas, forty icefall Sherpas, a BBC team, and a Sunday Times reporter were covered by a lavish sponsorship by Barclays Bank. As Dyhrenfurth had in 1963, Bonington in 1975 rationalized that a massive expedition was necessary for so monumental a challenge—no fast-and-light style, however appealing, would win the prize. “On the South West Face of Everest . . .” he wrote in Everest: The Hard Way, “there could be no question of such an approach. . . . I found the sheer immensity of the problem fascinating. . . . Perhaps I am a frustrated Field-Marshal, my passion for war games and my early military career providing a clue in this direction.” (Bonington was a graduate of Sandhurst, the royal military academy.)
Despite the intensifying cold that had thwarted the first British attempt in 1972, Bonington once again chose to assault the Southwest Face in the postmonsoon autumn. Much of the rock and ice on the face would be covered by monsoon snows, making the climbing slightly less technical and safer from rock fall. But the trade-off was a dramatic increase in avalanche danger. Another consideration was that other teams from other countries already had their eyes on the objective and were wangling for permits for 1976. Bonington had to seize the first opportunity offered by the Nepalese authorities.
On Annapurna’s south face in 1970, the strong egos of the principal climbers had sparked some bitter clashes. Mick Burke and the American Tom Frost felt particularly vexed, for while they had led the hardest pitches in the middle section of the face and felt they’d earned the right to go for the top, Bonington passed them over in favor of Don Whillans and Dougal Haston for the summit team. In turn, their teammates felt that Haston and Whillans—particularly the latter—had played a chess game with positions on the mountain, minimizing their own load carries and saving their energy so that they could go into the front from the high camp.
Somehow Bonington held this explosive mixture of strong personalities together. A measure of his teammates’ faith in their leader emerged in the official Annapurna expedition book, for which all the members gave Bonington the right to read and quote from their diaries, even when they let fly with accusations against one another. Bonington further won his team’s respect by taking on his own share of sharp leads and heavy load carries, while exempting himself from the chance to go to the summit. Unlike Karl Herrligkoffer on Nanga Parbat or Ardito Desio on K2, Bonington was no tyrant who dictated troop movements through a base camp telescope. And in his younger years, Bonington had notched exceptionally bold climbs of his own, the equal of those of any Englishman of his generation, including the first British ascent of the Eiger Nordwand and the first ascent of the lethal Central Pillar of Freney on Mont Blanc.
A drama similar to the Annapurna scenario played itself out on the Southwest Face of Everest in 1975. Once again, all the members gave Bonington free rein to quote from their diaries, even when they criticized one another. Of Haston, for instance, Bonington himself wrote in his diary, “Dougal’s approach is undoubtedly that of a prima donna; he reckons that he wants to get to the top, that he deserves the top and that he’s certainly the best person to go there. I’m inclined to agree with him.” Some of the less egotistical (but equally talented) members were disheartened by the jostling for position, with its unequal division of tasks. Thus Martin Boysen wrote in his diary on September 9:
It’s such a large expedition. I just don’t feel the necessary sense of involvement. It really doesn’t matter if I’m here or not. I have done sweet Fanny Adams [i.e., very little] apart from dragging my unwilling body up and down the Ice Fall. Worse, it’s dangerous, menaced by avalanches and I just don’t feel like sticking my neck out for something I just don’t feel wound up with.
With relative efficiency, and huge support from the high-altitude Sherpas, the team built its pyramid of camps and supplies up the fan-shaped lower slopes and through the gully that led to the broad horizontal snowfield below the upper rock bands. There were plenty of near misses by avalanches, one of which destroyed an empty tent at Camp IV while Haston slept alone in the adjoining tent, only a few feet away. All the men confessed to strained nerves and dark apprehensions. But by September 16, the team had established their Camp V at 25,500 feet, on the right edge of the gully-funnel in the middle of the face.
Now, after much consultation with his teammates, Bonington made a crucial decision. Rather than follow the right-rising ramp that had led to the 27,200-foot camp first established by Whillans and Haston in 1971, the team would push up the steep couloir to the left that the Japanese had aimed for on the first two attempts on the face.
The job of leading those pitches, which would turn out to be the hardest on the whole route, fell to Nick Estcourt and Tut Braithwaite. On September 20, that duo sur
mounted a radically steep series of chimneys and ramps mixed with patches of bare, loose rock. The photos in the lavishly illustrated expedition book make it clear just how “out there” was the climbing Estcourt and Braithwaite tackled above 26,000 feet. Bonington later saluted his two soldiers for “solv[ing] the problem of the Rock Band.” Once ropes were fixed through that exposed passage, the team was able to get supplies high enough to build a Camp VI at 27,300 feet at the top of the Rock Band.
From there, someone would be designated to make the first summit bid. The top was only 1,700 feet above Camp VI, but the route was uncertain, and everyone feared the kind of dead end that had stopped the 1971 and 1972 expeditions at 27,200 feet much farther to the right.
In performing their brilliant leads through the Rock Band, Estcourt and Braithwaite had nailed the crux of the whole route. But in doing so, they had exhausted themselves, and, like Burke and Frost on Annapurna, had sacrificed their own chances to go to the summit. The selfless example the two men set was teamwork at its best. Estcourt and Braithwaite reveled in the challenge of climbing at the limits of their skill through the Rock Band, and for them that was reward enough. If only two climbers could get to the top by the Southwest Face, it would be a victory for the whole team.
• • •
In the expedition book, Bonington admits that he decided early on who would get the first shot at the summit. “I felt that Doug Scott and Dougal Haston probably were the strongest pair,” he wrote. “They seemed to get on well together, were very experienced and determined, and for each this was the third visit to the South West Face.” Meanwhile, however, Bonington was trying to position a second party to head for the top after Scott and Haston tried to push the route. (It’s worth remembering that Hillary and Tenzing were the second summit party in 1953, after Charles Evans and Tom Bourdillon had made the first try, turning back at the South Summit, only 300 vertical feet short of the top.)
I’ve always wondered how Bonington pulled off the diplomatic trick of being an absolute leader, in the sense that his orders to his teammates were never countermanded, while still allowing the opinions of members as headstrong as Haston or Whillans to influence his decisions. It’s quite a trick. Bonington’s own superb climbing on the mountain went a long way toward winning his teammates’ loyalty. Among all the expeditions I’ve been on, the closest comparable leadership model was that of Jim Whittaker on the Peace Climb in 1990, but on that adventure, Jim shared at least nominal leadership with the Soviet and Chinese commanders. And for that matter, the Soviets pretty much ignored what Jim asked them to do. Another comparable model was the one that David Breashears set in 1996 on our IMAX expedition, when he led from the front all the way up Everest. In any event, I’m quite sure that if I’d had the honor to be invited on a climb with the likes of Doug Scott or Peter Boardman, I would have done just what Bonington asked me to do.
Thus Bonington planned to get a second party up to Camp VI with enough supplies to be ready to go for the top a couple of days after Haston and Scott made their attempt. One of the principal climbers, Hamish MacInnes, had been badly spooked by a near-miss in an avalanche, during which he inhaled ice-cold snow that affected his breathing for weeks afterward, so he withdrew his name from the “lottery.” And as on Annapurna, Bonington had chosen to exclude himself from any summit attempt. There still remained seven fit and ambitious climbers vying for what they assumed were four places in the two summit teams. In effect, however, there were only three places, since Bonington wanted to follow the example of the British in 1953 and the Americans in 1963 and give one of the summit slots to the best Sherpa. Two of them, Pertemba and Ang Phurba, had carried loads uncomplainingly throughout the trip and were well acclimatized, even though the technical climbing skills of both were minimal.
Although he had already divulged the decision to give Haston and Scott the first shot, Bonington kept his thinking about the second party to himself until September 21, when he announced his plan to his teammates via intercamp radio. Martin Boysen’s diary records the high drama of that moment:
We waited tense with expectation and ambition. Hamish took the call and Chris came over loud and clear in the warm air of the afternoon.
“I’ve decided after a lot of thought . . .” Wait for it, I listened only for the names not the justifications . . . “Mick, Martin, Pete and Pertemba . . .” Thank God for that. “Tut, Nick, Ang Phurba.”
The radio stopped and everyone departed quietly with their own hopes, ambitions and disappointments.
The great surprise in Bonington’s announcement was that the second summit party would consist of four climbers, not two: Burke, Boysen, Boardman, and Pertemba. Estcourt, Braithwaite, and Ang Phurba were offered the token hope of a third summit attempt, but everyone on the team knew that was not likely to happen.
The plan for the first summit push demanded an extreme effort from Scott and Haston, for Bonington asked them to string 1,500 feet of fixed rope along the difficult rightward passage of the uppermost snowfield. That would take a whole day in itself, so the duo would have to return to Camp VI and make their summit bid the following day. But a string of fixed ropes would maximize the chances of a second team getting to the summit.
On September 23, Scott and Haston performed their assigned task to a T, even though the terrain was dicey in the extreme, as the men kicked through a thin crust of snow only to feel their crampon points skitter on rock beneath. (I know exactly what that kind of climbing is like, having faced it on the north side of Everest, as well as high on K2 as we traversed out of the Bottleneck Couloir. You’re tempted to take your crampons off, because they give such poor purchase on the rock, but boots alone—not to mention Cordura overboots—are no match for snow and ice. Your only hope on such terrain is to make the points of your crampons find tenuous purchase on rock blanketed under powder snow.)
Haston led the crux pitch, a rock step on which he pounded five pitons into manky cracks to use for aid. The rock was so shattered that twice the pitons came loose as he put his weight on them, and he skidded a few feet on the slabs before catching himself. “Nasty stuff, youth,” Scott commented admiringly as he seconded the pitch. (Scott called every climbing partner “youth,” even though in this case he was a mere year older than Haston.)
Having strung out all 1,500 feet of rope and securing it with decent snow and rock anchors, the two men turned back to Camp VI, well satisfied with their crucial effort. “More to the point,” Haston later wrote, “we hadn’t exhausted ourselves in doing it.”
At 1:00 a.m. on September 24, Scott and Haston woke to the dismaying sound of a rising wind that flung spindrift against the tent walls. It was so cold that both men put on all their clothing and gear, including crampons, harnesses, rucksacks, and oxygen apparatus, inside the tent. They were off by 3:30. Theirs was one of the first pre-dawn starts ever made from a highest camp on Everest. Thanks in part to better clothing and good headlamps, the thinking about summit day had changed a lot since 1963, when Unsoeld and Hornbein felt they couldn’t leave their tent until first light at 6:50.
Haston had decided that the two men should carry a stove, a pot, and a bivouac sack. In fact he even contemplated, if the going proved very difficult, bivouacking on the way to the summit, rather than as a last-ditch option on the way down. To me, that’s unimaginable. I’ve always felt that bivouacking on an 8,000-meter peak is a desperate resort, something to be avoided at all costs. I heartily endorse the old joke that bivouac is a French word meaning “mistake.” But once again, it’s a matter of each climber’s notion of his margin of safety. Mine will always be broader than that of a climber like Haston, who again and again pushed himself to the very limits of survival because a summit meant so much to him.
The going indeed proved slow, and the men’s schedule was further hindered when they had to stop for an hour to try to fix Haston’s oxygen apparatus, which had stopped working. There at 28,000 feet, with bare hands, they took the whole rig apart piece by piece, fi
nally discovering a lump of ice that had blocked the junction between the tube and the mouthpiece.
The terrain was difficult enough that the men not only roped up but belayed each other, placing the odd piton for protection or anchor. By 1:00 p.m., they had used their last piton, but they now stood at the foot of a diagonal couloir that led to the South Summit. Here, however, they ran into the worst snow conditions they’d found in days: a wind crust below which their feet floundered in soft, loose powder snow. As Haston later described the agony of breaking trail in that couloir, “I’d bang the slope to shatter the crust, push away the debris, move up, sink in. Thigh. Sweep away. Knees. Gain a metre. Then repeat the process.” At that rate, he admitted, he thought that “we’d be lucky to make even the South Summit.”
It was not until 3:00, in fact, that Scott and Haston stood on the South Summit. They’d been going steadily for almost twelve hours, and they were very tired. That would have already been an hour beyond my turnaround time, and in their situation, I’m pretty sure I’d have headed down. But those two guys were true hard men, and to be fair, the dictum of a hard-and-fast turnaround time had not come into common practice by 1975. Even today, not everyone adheres to a predetermined turnaround time. Some climbers will retreat in the face of worsening weather or exhaustion, but others simply keep going, no matter what, until they reach the summit. Many first-rate climbers claim their summits only at sunset. The descents they face therafter are usually dicey in the extreme.
It was now that Haston proposed huddling in the bivvy sac until sunset, then going on to the summit when the snow might have frozen up, allowing better purchase. But that’s a tactic better suited to the Alps than to Everest. It’s so cold and dry at 28,700 feet, I doubt that sunset would have changed the conditions much. Fortunately for both men, Scott nixed the idea of a presummit bivouac. “Look after the rope,” he said to his partner. “I’m going to try at least a rope length to sample conditions.”