Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  Abby’s mother Janet had collapsed on her way to Ginny’s funeral over a year before and had never really recovered. We went to see her that spring at a rest home in Liverpool, close to Abby’s own home, and I sensed that she did not have long to live. A month before I was due to leave for Everest, I joined Abby in fulfilling a promise I had made to Ginny two years before. Her father, who had fought our teenage love for so long, had been buried in a churchyard close by the family chalk quarry in the South Downs of West Sussex. But no headstone had ever been erected at his grave due, in a roundabout way, to a nationwide gravediggers’ strike at the time of his death. We had contacted the relevant vicar and, on a cold clear February morning with a group of Tom Pepper’s old friends and relations, we prayed by his newly erected headstone.

  During the last month before going to Everest, I discovered that I could not properly hold a standard ice-axe in my frost-damaged left hand. So we went to DMM, a climbing gear factory in Wales, where they sponsored me with a special axe with a thin shaft as well as a steel hook for, hopefully, gripping those tiny holds that my half-fingers could not manage. Whilst in Wales we also went with an old SAS friend to the Cardiff Millennium Stadium to watch Wales defeat England at rugby.

  No football fan, I had recently acquired a definite appetite for watching the fifteen-man sport at national level after meeting the Irish team in Dublin. Ten days before they were due to fly to Australia for the 2003 World Cup, their manager Eddie O’Sullivan and former captain Keith Woods had me flown out at the last minute to lecture the squad on ‘team morale when the odds look bad’. I had talked to the forty-strong group for an hour in a small closely packed hotel room. No smiles. No laughter. Just intense frowns that looked to me like glares. I don’t remember ever feeling so much concentrated human power in one place before. But when I stopped talking, their enthusiastic questioning went on for a second hour, and Eddie sent me emails of their subsequent excellent progress down under.

  My own power during the run-up weeks to Everest was not improved by a severe bout of bronchitis. Louise was worried and booked me to see various lung, chest and heart specialists, starting with my own cardiac surgeon Gianni Angelini in Bristol and progressing to Dr John Costello, a lung expert, in London. An altitude test chamber simulated up to 15,000 feet above sea-level where I had to perform various lung function tests, and then have blood taken. The results, which were quickly available, were disappointing. They showed a limitation of flow in my airways, presumably due to my previous smoking. The flow was 80 per cent of what it should have been for a man of my age and height and, in John Costello’s professional opinion, ‘would be an important limiting factor in my ability to carry on at 7,000 metres and above’. Additionally, my ability to saturate my bloodstream with oxygen, a key function when exerting yourself at high altitude, was badly impaired. Coupled with my cardiac status which dictated never getting badly out of breath, I was not an ideal candidate for an Everest attempt. Better news was that the organisers of our Everest fundraiser, the Ran Fiennes Healthy Hearts Appeal, had already raised, prior to our departure, more than the entire £70,000 the charity had managed to total following our 7x7x7 marathons.

  7 March was my sixty-first birthday. Five days later Louise and I were married, and a fortnight after that we left Heathrow bound for Kathmandu in Nepal. At the airport a reporter from The Times interviewed Louise and asked her all the usual questions. She admitted she was worried about the altitude and the strain on my heart. This reminded me of Sherpa Tenzing’s account of his wife’s reaction when told he was joining John Hunt’s attempt on Everest. ‘You are too weak,’ she said. ‘You will get ill again, or you will slip on the ice and fall and kill yourself.’ ‘No, I will look out for myself,’ he told her. ‘Just like I always have.’ Adventuring husbands have always been having these prior-to-departure conversations.

  Those members of our team we did not meet at Heathrow we caught up with in Kathmandu where we were introduced to our group leader. He was a tall Scotsman named David Hall. His number two, Neal Short from Liverpool, was small and mild-mannered. The rest of the group included my South African friend, Sibusiso, at whose suggestion I had become involved in the first place, and Ian Parnell, a professional freelance climbing photographer, who was covering my climb for The Times and, with minimal equipment training, was organising live TV coverage for BBC Breakfast TV.

  Ian later wrote:

  My first introduction to Ran was when I received a phone call from him pretty much out of the blue in February 2005. ‘Ian, would you like to go to Everest with me?’ ‘Er . . . um . . . well, maybe . . . when?’ ‘We leave in two weeks, it’ll be a ten-week trip.’ ‘Well I was meant to be travelling to the States to see my girlfriend.’ ‘Ian, I’m sure she’ll understand. If you have any problems, let me have a word. I tell you what, I’ll give you twenty-four hours to talk it over with her.’ So within two minutes of talking to Ran for the first time, I’d been invited to spend three months with him on the world’s highest mountain and had twenty-four hours to make a choice.

  My job on the expedition was to facilitate live broadcasts and send back film and still pictures to be used by the BBC and The Times newspaper. The fact that over ten weeks this probably only amounted to twenty minutes of footage makes this task seem pretty trivial. However, the reality proved pretty challenging. My first inklings of this reality gap came when I went to Broadcasting House to pick up all the equipment I would be using. The conversation with one technical guy started with, ‘Can you get power on the summit?’ I wasn’t sure how to answer. Was he wondering if there was a mains plug, or something? ‘Well, how about getting a generator up there?’ he asked. Considering that most people could barely walk at over 29,000 feet and the Sherpas were pushed carrying enough oxygen for everyone, there was no chance. We eventually settled for a relatively lightweight battery-operated set-up. When I say relatively lightweight, I’m talking about an extra twenty-five pounds of equipment.

  Problems started early. The laptop computer’s hard disk drive gave up the ghost only a week into the trip, while other parts of the set-up needed constant nursing to keep operating. A typical broadcast would involve an hour or so spent locating satellites for the two sat phones in series. Of course, with one sat phone locked in, the other phone would drop its connection, and vice versa – it was a constant plate-juggling trick. Having finally got both phones talking to Broadcasting House, I’d have to fire up the video phone, which unfortunately developed an alarming syndrome of cutting out every five minutes. Each live interview lasted about three minutes, so the timing when to crank up the video phone was crucial. To top it all, I discovered the batteries had a warning that they shouldn’t be used below +5°C. Considering that the average temperature at Everest Advance Base Camp hovered around –10°C, we had a constant battle on our hands. The trick, I found, was to get in my sleeping bag and put the batteries on my belly minutes before transmission.

  But, as with most things in life, the more effort you have to put in, the greater the reward. So, despite the struggles, we managed not to miss a single broadcast, and the feeling as you listen to a live interview broadcasting from the slopes of Everest all the way back to the UK is one that rivals the feelings I have when I reach mountain summits.

  Two other South Africans in our group, Alex Harris and Mark Campbell, were both experienced climbers and good friends of Sibusiso. Tore Rasmussen was a Norwegian businessman, hobby climber and black belt karate instructor. Fred Ziel from California was our doctor. Like Sibu, and indeed with Sibu, he had been on a previous Jagged Globe Everest climb, on the south side, but he had failed, where Sibu had succeeded, and he had suffered frostbite damage to his fingers and nose. Jens Bojen, born in Norway, was now a Grimsby businessman with a lifelong experience of North Sea fishing. Although a year older than me, he was twice as fit and the proud possessor of an abnormally slow heart rate. Rosalind Buckton had once very nearly been the first British woman to climb Everest and, although now in her l
ate fifties, was keen to succeed on this her second attempt.

  The general opinion of the more experienced climbers in our group was that our Tibetan northern route was a bigger challenge than the Nepalese southern route, pioneered by John Hunt’s British expedition of 1953 which made the first ascent. This was because our route involved more time spent higher than 8,400 metres, in the notorious ‘Death Zone’. The twin words ‘altitude’ and ‘acclimatisation’ were on our group’s lips much of the time. Sensible application of the latter, the old hands constantly assured us, would be our main way of defeating the potentially lethal effects of the former.

  The next day we started our drive towards Everest Base Camp 400 kilometres (250 miles) away and at an elevation of 5,200 metres (17,000 feet). We would drive there in stages because we must not rush our acclimatisation process. At Base Camp there would already be just half the oxygen available at sea-level. We travelled north-east towards the Nepalese/Tibetan border in jeeps, our gear on high-back lorries, and we all attempted to drink four litres (eight pints) daily, as advised by David, our leader. The border town of Zhangmu, a place of shabby wood huts on the Nepalese side and ugly concrete blockhouses in Tibet, buzzed with groups similar to ours and all with the same thing on their minds . . . the summit. As we joined various queues in the complex process of passing through Chinese customs, security and immigration, I met nine climbers of different nationalities, some aiming to climb Everest solo but most with commercial groups and streetwise handlers adept at dealing with Chinese bureaucracy.

  From Zhangmu the scenery changed from relatively bland to spectacular as our road, evilly potholed and often edged with sheer drops to our immediate left and cliff walls to the right, fought its tortuous way up the sheer and rugged gorge of the Bhote Kosi. A thousand feet below, often immediately below us, roiled and roared the fearsome rapids of the Bhote Kosi heading back south to Nepal. Neal assured us we had already been lucky on two counts when our convoy reached our overnight stop, the raggedy town of Nyalam. Not only had we avoided ambush by Maoist terrorists in Nepal who shot up tourists or merely stopped them and demanded cash, but, secondly, we had to date been spared the avalanches and mud slides which most years plague the Nyalam road. What we could not avoid were the rat-infested, filth-encrusted rooms in Zhangmu and Nyalam. I itched like hell. Louise was fairly stoical but, a migraine-sufferer since her teens, her headaches were exacerbated by the ever increasing altitude. Others in our group also began to complain of lethargy, appetite loss and splitting headaches, and Dr Fred offered us all the altitude sickness prevention drug Diamox.

  An hour or so north of Nyalam, our convoy eased into the main Himalayan range between India and Asia, the mightiest geographical feature on the earth’s surface. It boasts more than a hundred peaks in excess of 24,000 feet (7,315 metres) above sea-level, and includes all the famed fourteen 8,000ers, the trophy peaks over 8,000 metres (26,247 feet) whose summits are ‘collected’ by many dedicated high altitude climbers, the first of whom was Reinhold Messner. For hours we travelled on up over the high dusty plateau until we came to a couple of passes, the higher being the Lalung La at 5,125 metres (16,810 feet).

  The Tibetan Plateau stretches across south-west China, bounded by the deserts of the Tarim and Qaidam to the north and the Himalayan, Karakoram, and Pamir mountain chains to the south and west. With an elevation of nearly five kilometres above sea-level, this desolate, dry, windswept landscape is the world’s highest plateau. Wild yaks were once abundant on the plateau, but they were mostly killed off for meat from the 1950s, when new roads made the area more accessible to hunters.

  After Nyalam’s concrete scenery, we passed isolated villages the same orange-brown hue as the wide country vistas that rolled away beneath the great clear blue sky. The wind was always blowing when we stopped to leg-stretch, and the spring weather seemed always cold and dry. Our average height now, on these panoramic plains between high crumbly hills, was some 4,300 metres (14,000 feet). The Tibetan herders and farmers were clearly a hard bunch. Their squat adobe huts, isolated or in hamlet clusters, were often close by stone-built ruins of ancient Buddhist monasteries destroyed in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, often along with their inmates. Potato and barley crops showed between intricate irrigation ditches, whilst scraggy sheep, goats and yaks roamed free.

  After many hours our road began to turn east and we came to the village of Tingri, built on a hillside with an impressive view looking back to the south of a distant array of snow-clad peaks floating on cloud. This was the great Himalayan range that reached east and west from Everest, mother of all mountains. Our convoy hove to in a dusty football field-sized courtyard with low dormitory blocks on three sides. A canteen and office provided the only facilities, and rooftop squat toilets awaited the growing number of our group with uneasy stomachs. From this fly-ridden base we trudged out of town and climbed local hills to find our feet at our new altitude of 4,390 metres (14,400 feet). I discovered that I could keep up with or ahead of most of the others without undue effort or breathlessness. So far, so good.

  From Tingri our group headed east on a switchback drive over the 5,120-metre (16,800 feet) Pang La pass. We stopped at the highest point to take photographs, for the view was impressive. Everest was now clearly visible, crested by a plume of ice crystal ‘smoke’, indicating violent winds on the summit ridge. The highest mountain on earth was certainly no visual let-down.

  The onward road took us through moon scenery with wide river beds now dry but ready conduits for awesome melt-floods. Towering glacial moraines loomed above and twisted spires of rock supported boulders, big as churches, which teetered on the highest ledges and threatened imminent freefall. Some four hours after the Pang La, we came to the Rongbuk Monastery, close to the original Base Camp used by the pioneering British expeditions of the 1920s. It was from here that Mallory and Irvine set out in 1924 never to return. Then we climbed sharply up a narrow valley, the Rongbuk Gorge, which widened quite suddenly to become a bleak, flat plain some 500 metres wide between high hills with Everest dead ahead. This plain, home to the modern Everest Base Camp, was dotted with the colourful tents of at least a dozen expedition groups and was swept by a bitter cold wind from the glaciers above. Everest herself, now only twelve miles away, rose impressively above us, black rock streaked with ice and crowned with snow.

  Louise and I shared a two-man tent which was hardly a honeymoon suite. There was a fairly cramped communal tent for meals and various stores tents. David introduced us to our Sherpas, small powerful men with affable features, and we settled down for the night.

  Due largely to a Nepalese government clampdown on the number of climbers they allowed annually on Everest, more and more groups and individuals were switching to our Tibetan approach. We learned that at least 400 individuals would be hoping to climb the northern route over the next few weeks. Some years there was enough good weather to allow climbers to sneak briefly on to the summit, other years nobody made it at all, however great their skill and their strength. Most years people died trying. The current death rate was estimated at one in every ten attempts.

  We spent two weeks in Base Camp at 5,200 metres (17,060 feet), sometimes trudging a few miles upwards on the Everest trail or back downhill to the Rongbuk Monastery. Acclimatisation was the main aim of our existence. Louise still suffered severe headaches but stayed with me for a fortnight before returning to England just before David decided we were ready to try our first trek up to the Advance Base Camp. Our gear was taken by sixty-five yaks with drivers who whistled and yelled at their animals when the trail was especially narrow or slippery.

  The morning before we left Base Camp, a Belfast police friend of mine, Noel Hanna, visited our group tent. I knew Noel from adventure racing in New Zealand. He was one of the fittest men in Britain and had been planning to marry his long-time fiancée on the Everest summit. His group had trudged up to the Advance Base Camp (ABC) a few days earlier, but Noel’s eyesight began to trouble him. His group leader di
agnosed tunnel vision, but a doctor with an ophthalmoscope later discovered ‘pools of blood’ behind his retinas where blood vessels had burst. He was now due to head back to Ireland for treatment as soon as possible or, he had been warned, he would risk permanent eye damage and possible blindness.

  Following behind Sibu and Alex I began the walk up the Rongbuk Valley from Base Camp on 12 April, often moving off the well-trodden but narrow path to make way for yaks coming back down from the ABC with loads of rubbish or barrels of latrine soil which is sold for crop manure in the valley. Past ecological outcry had resulted in a system of payment to yak drivers for this litter removal service, which was becoming ever more necessary as the annual numbers of climbers increased exponentially.

  As we moved up the glacial valley, banks of hardened mud and rock pinnacles, some as high as thirty metres, flanked our progress. Rocks rain down regularly from these walls on to the path below but, thankfully, not while we were passing. After some four kilometres we trudged up a steep scree slope and into a side valley. This, after a few hours, widened out into the corridor of the East Rongbuk Glacier, our highway to Everest.

  I knew that all 2005 summit bids had to be completed by the first week of June because that was the annual date for the arrival of the monsoon winds which would make Everest lethal to climbers. I still had about fifty days in which to reach the top and thereby, I hoped, enable the Heart Foundation to raise our £2 million target. I also had a personal pet hope. For twenty-three years I had competed with Norwegians for polar firsts. Now I had a chance of going for another. Only a handful of individuals had managed to cross both Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean. Børge Ousland was one of them, and he had tried to add Everest to his trophy list. Sibu and Dr Fred had been with him when he had decided to turn round not far short of the summit. So I hoped that my heart, my lungs and, remembering Noel Hanna, my retinas would behave themselves for the next fifty days. Weather permitting, I might then raise my £2 million and beat the Norwegians. Wishful thinking, I realised, but there was no harm in hoping.