Why do these trophy-hunters annoy me so much? And doesn’t Ranulph Fiennes fall into the same category? In answer to question two: absolutely not. Fiennes is one of the most self-effacing, focused people here and is climbing Everest only to raise £2 million for charity: he talks about almost nothing else.
The Times journalist was less enthusiastic about the ABC lavatory facilities, one of which was very close to The Times tent. I have experienced many such way-out facilities all over the world. In order of dreadfulness, I would rate the long communal muddy trench with a sit-on-pole down its length, as dug for the annual Karrimor Mountain Marathon in the UK, as winner, a short head in front of the Soviet military bucket squat galley in Sredniy, Siberia. Then came the Everest loos. Rosalind was unlucky enough one night to lose her spectacles (and her head torch, if the camp gossip was to be believed) down one of our loos. As deputy boss, the task of locating and retrieving both items fell to Neal, who did so successfully and without complaining.
On 30 May we were still ensconsed at ABC and still waiting for the high roar of the jet stream winds, up to 200 mph on Everest’s upper reaches, to die away and stay away for the five-day period of calm, clear weather that we would need to attempt the climb. Such a break in the jet streams usually comes just before the onslaught of the annual monsoon storms which arrive most years in the first few days of June. Some years the break never comes, and nobody summits Everest. And some years the break only lasts a day or two, catches people out in the Death Zone and kills them.
The group leader has the often extremely difficult task of assessing from met forecasts whether or not to risk the lives of his clients, all of whom will be raring to go, especially if they can see the fatal date of the monsoon’s dreaded arrival fast approaching. Many clients will have spent some US$65,000 of their savings and will know they are unlikely to have another chance, so they champ at the bit at the ongoing wimpishness, as they see it, of any group leader who is still refusing to try for the summit with only five or six days left till the monsoon is likely to be due.
At last, on 31 May, half of our group left ABC for their summit attempt. David had sensibly divided us into a fast-moving greyhound group of Sibu, Tore, Alex and Fred, led by him, while group two, led by Neal, would be Mark, Jens, Ian and me.
On the other side of Everest, only a single day of less strong winds is needed to climb from the South Col to the summit and back. Jagged Globe’s group on that side, led by Kenton, summitted on 31 May. That same day I made it up to the North Col camp with the rest of group two. Group one were, by then, two camps ahead of us and experiencing high winds. The North Col camp, in the lee of a great snow wall, was the last haven of shelter all the way to the summit, so our group, sleeping with oxygen, stayed there awaiting orders from David to come on up once his group had vacated our tents. This leapfrog shuffle would involve the three camps between the North Col and the summit, positioned at 7,500 metres (Camp Two), 7,900 metres (Camp Three), and 8,400 metres (Death Camp).
We had set out from ABC much later than would have been possible in a normal monsoon year. But in 2005 it was running late, so we just squeezed in. Of the 400 would-be climbers in ABC, about one-third had been forced to give up during the ongoing bad weather in May, due to ill-health, homesickness, flight dates, or visa restrictions.
I was happy to have made it to the North Col Camp at a reasonable rate; slower than the rest, but not by much. I was feeling far better physically than at any time over the past month. The Col is hard grind. I had read descriptions of it by experienced climbers. One, Andy Politz, was part of an earlier group who located Mallory’s body. He wrote simply, ‘The entire lower half of the Col was an exercise in surviving torture.’
Scaling the Col involves a series of short, nearly vertical steps interspersed with steep snow slopes and twisting crevasse detours. The relief when reaching the last ladders over a wide crevasse, just a few metres from the first tent at the Col Camp, is huge. I tottered into one of the four tents our Sherpas had erected for us, fairly near to the great snow wall that gives protection from the violent west winds and surrounded by some ninety or more other tents. The toilet arrangements were simple. You squatted as near as was safely possible to the edge of the ice precipice on the far side of the encampment. Slipping on the ice there would be a bad idea, for the resulting fall would be over 1,000 feet.
At the Col Camp I spent a lot of time in the tent fiddling with my oxygen system in the knowledge that most deaths on the upper reaches of Everest are the result of oxygen shortage, and the oxygen regulator is the key to survival. New Zealander Russell Bryce, generally accepted as head honcho on the north side, had kindly lent me a spare regulator as all the Jagged Globe spares were already in use. The oxygen systems we used were made by Poisk in Russia, and they had been in use for many years but were prone to failed seals and valves due to grit particles and ice. The smaller orange cylinders most in use gave five or six hours of oxygen if you set a flow rate on the regulator dial of 2.5 litres a minute. The larger 1,000-litre canisters gave ten hours on this setting.
Eventually our number two group set out from Col Camp. The sky was clear and the winds manageable, so we all made good time up the long steep snow ramps to where shattered shale underfoot gradually replaced the snow, and the fixed ropes edged to the right, at first gently then, for the last hour, at quite a steep gradient. This 7,500-metre camp was much smaller than the Col Camp and the few dozen tents there were tattered, in some cases completely shredded. Our own two tents had survived well and we all slept on oxygen. Each time I woke to knock frozen dribble from my mask, I intoned, ‘Only two days to the top and two million quid in the kitty.’
From 7,300 to 7,500 metres the wind had picked up and made life quite unpleasant. My oxygen mask kept needing adjustment, my frost-damaged feet spent a good deal of time complaining that my Kathmandu-purchased boots were too tight, and my frostbitten hand needed many halts to force blood back into the fingers during those stretches where I needed to keep the fixed rope on my right-hand side. Let me explain to anyone who is not a climber how Everest hopefuls who are upwards-trudgers like me haul themselves up the many thousands of feet from the base of the North Col, where the fixed rope starts, to the summit where it stops.
You have a climbing harness around your waist and crutch and to a strong point on the belt’s front just above your tummy button there is attached a steel karabiner (or krab). A loop or sling is attached to this krab. Another detachable device, also on your sling, is clipped on to the fixed ropes that lead you up the mountain. This is called a jumar (or ascendeur), and has metal teeth. Slide the jumar up the rope and it runs along smoothly, but any downwards pull and the jumar’s teeth will clench the rope and stop you falling.
Because there are hundreds of knots and fixed points along the rope line, you always use two of these slings and never unclip one until the other is attached to the rope beyond the obstacle. Many of the bodies lying along the rope line and below it are there because they slipped and fell when briefly unattached to the mountain or a rope. You can’t add to the number of corpses who died from that particular fate so long as you always use the two-sling system – and so long as the fixed rope does not break or come loose. The older ropes are often cut by falling rocks or chafed through by rubbing on sharp points, so Sherpas assess and, where necessary, renew them most years. But it still pays to keep checking every rope that you intend to rely on.
The 7,500-metre ‘camp’ was in reality a raggedy series of ledges, anywhere big enough for a tiny tent to be pitched with guy ropes tied mostly around rocks in lieu of tent pegs. The recent big winds that had held up David’s group had rendered many of the tents I passed mere skeletal tent-pole hoops attached to wildly fluttering bits of material. Cylinders and food packs and bric-a-brac lay all around. Every so often a couple of climbers would slowly descend, and I would unclip myself to let them pass down the rope. They often moved like zombies and were unrecognisable in their hooded, goggled sameness.
One of them was our doctor, Fred Ziel, who had sensibly turned round too sick to continue.
Between the 7,500- and the 7,900-metre camps the going became harder, with many slippery rocks and icy runnels to negotiate. A strong cold wind from one flank had the effect, I am not sure why, of blocking off oxygen, at least partially, somewhere between the cylinder in my rucksack and my mask. This caused constant halts to turn away from the wind and breathe deeply. My hooded down jacket covered parts of the system to stop them freezing up, but in order to reach them or to alter the flow setting, I needed to undo the jacket’s main zip. Dribble from the mask often landed on the zip and froze it solid. Should my goggles mist up or move out of place, I again needed to unzip. Whereas these sorts of clothing problems had often occurred on polar expeditions in far colder circumstances, they had not involved the added complications of an oxygen system, nor being attached to a mountainside, nor feeling below par due to the altitude. In the Arctic most travel was at three or four feet above sea-level, and in Antarctica we had suffered from altitude sickness at a mere 11,000 feet up.
I kept checking that my system’s pipes were not snagged, nor the mask workings frozen, but I never managed to discover why, every so often in strong winds, the oxygen stopped coming and I had to tear my mouth from the mask and try to gulp in air. I had set out from 7,500 metres an hour earlier than Ian, Jens, Mark and Neal in order to reach the next camp at the same time as them. My driving aim as I toiled up the mountain was to keep ahead as long as possible, growing to dread the moment I heard the crunch of their boots just below me. Halfway through the morning, Mark caught up with me. We lifted tired arms in greeting. There was no point in trying to communicate verbally as the wind tore away the words.
At 7,900 metres the camp was perched on tiny tilted ledges and felt, I thought, unpleasantly exposed. But I also enjoyed a new feeling of anticipation because the summit ridge that, for the past seventy days had seemed so far away and so high as to be unobtainable, now for the first time looked within reasonable grasp. How many other hopeful folk had reached this point and likewise felt they could make it, only to die within forty-eight hours? A good many. At least one out of every ten. The most famous were, of course, Mallory and Irvine.
In 1924 Mallory was on the mountain for a third time. The British were gradually pushing the northern route, experimenting with oxygen, and Mallory was their best climber. That year their colleagues far below spotted Mallory and Irvine on the summit ridge through binoculars, but neither man ever made it back down. To this day it is uncertain if they reached the summit, but in 1999 a group of top US climbers searched for Mallory and Irvine’s bodies in the area around and above the 7,900-metre camp, especially the snow basins beneath the steeper rock faces. Bodies dressed in brightly-coloured Gore-Tex jackets were not hard to find. The climbers recorded, ‘We found ourselves in a kind of collection zone for fallen climbers . . . Just seeing these twisted, broken bodies was a pretty stark reminder of our own mortality.’ Then one of the Americans, Conrad Anker, spotted something different. He thought he had discovered the remains of Andrew Irvine: ‘We were looking at a man who had been clinging to the mountain for seventy-five years. The clothing was blasted from most of his body, and his skin was bleached white. I felt like I was viewing a Greek or Roman marble statue.’
Soon the five searchers were crouched around the body in awed silence.
The body itself did the speaking. For here was a body unlike the others crumpled in crannies elsewhere on the terrace. This body was lying fully extended, facedown and pointing uphill, frozen in a position of self-arrest, as if the fall had happened only moments earlier. The head and upper torso were frozen into the rubble that had gathered around them over the decades, but the arms, powerfully muscular still, extended above the head to strong hands that gripped the mountainside, flexed fingertips dug deep into the frozen gravel. The legs were extended downhill. One was broken and the other had been gently crossed over it for protection. Here too, the musculature was still pronounced and powerful. The entire body had about it the strength and grace of a dancer. This body, this man, had once been a splendid specimen of humankind.
Name-tags on the tattered clothing remnants established that this was Mallory, not Irvine. The searchers concluded that:
George Mallory fell to his death from a spot well down the face of the Yellow Band, tantalizingly close to Camp VI and safety; his injuries are too mild, his body too unmarred, for there to be any other explanation. And he did not fall alone; at the critical moment, he appears to have been roped to his partner, Andrew Irvine. Irvine fell too and was injured, though not as profoundly as Mallory. They did not fall far. They did not fall from the dangerous Northeast Ridge, as had the many badly twisted bodies frozen in agonized death in the great catch-basin of the ‘snow terrace’.
The searchers’ conclusion was open-ended, but one wrote:
The route they pioneered to the Northeast Ridge in the 1920s is the one most climbed today on the north side. For the two of them to have gotten as high as they did with the resources they had is truly amazing. Whether or not they made the summit, they will forever hold a place as heroes on the world’s highest peak.
If Mallory and Irvine did not summit, it is certain that nobody else did until, twenty-nine years later, a British Commonwealth expedition under John Hunt, an Army colonel, finally placed two of its climbers, Ed Hillary from New Zealand and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay from Nepal, on the summit from the southern side on 29 May 1953. By then, ten expeditions had tried for the summit and failed, and thirteen men had died. The previous year Tenzing himself, with a Swiss climber, had been forced to turn back not far short of the summit. News of Hillary and Tenzing’s success was flashed to London just before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
By the end of 2006, records showed that, in the seventy-six years since Mallory’s death not far from my 7,900 metres tent, 2,062 climbers had reached the summit and 203 of them died on the mountain. Since there were ten climbers in our two groups, I wondered if any would succumb to this Everest law of decimation. Five climbers had died on the mountain already during the past month, I knew, and maybe more, since there were a number of lone climbers as yet unaccounted for at ABC.
The good weather spell was still with us at dawn on 3 June. Today we would move into the so-called Death Zone, above which the majority of North Ridge climber fatalities take place. Our next camp lay, at 8,400 metres, higher than all but five of the world’s mountain summits.
Two hours later, above 8,000 metres (26,246 feet), I was preoccupied with not slipping off the shale and ice, aware of, but studiously avoiding, any glimpse of the sharp drop to my right and focusing on slow but continuous movement to keep ahead of the others in my group. I had, as usual, set out an hour ahead of them and was determined to keep that lead. Luckily I felt stronger than before, probably because the oxygen system was working better because there was less wind.
One of America’s most famed modern-day climbers, David Breashears, described the act of upwards movement of the route. ‘Our bodies were dehydrated. Our fingers and toes went numb as precious oxygen was diverted to our brains, hearts and other vital organs. Climbing above 26,000 feet, even with bottled oxygen, is like running on a treadmill and breathing through a straw. Your body screams at you to turn around. Everything says: this is cold. This is impossible.’
There were some very steep sections where I had a problem passing other climbers descending in a dazed, clumsy state. I tried speaking to one who knocked his pack hard against me as he slipped down past me, but there was no reply. He looked exhausted. I passed by a climber curled up on a tiny ledge. As I cautiously unclipped to get by him, I asked if he was okay. There was no reply, but his hooded, masked head nodded slowly. It struck me that, if he was dying, I might well be accused of being one of those callous climbers who pass by the near dead without offering aid. But I had passed several such inert individuals and I myself had been passed as I rested, completely winded, on some t
iny perch, too tired even to acknowledge a passing greeting.
The media point fingers of guilt in such cases. The following year a Kiwi amputee climber, Mark Ingliss, was interviewed and agreed that, after he had talked to fellow climber, David Sharp, in a bad way some 1,300 feet below the summit and sheltering under a rock, he had moved on upwards, as had others in his group. All agreed that any rescue attempt would only cause more deaths. Many of the forty climbers who passed Sharp by assumed that his own group would save him, whereas in fact he was not with any group. His condition slowly deteriorated as climbers went by him on their way up and, later, back down. His chances of rescue diminished through the day. His legs, feet and fingers became frostbitten and dead, so he could no longer walk or use his hands. His oxygen gave out and he died, as some people do on this stretch of this mountain. When a climber near the summit of Mount Everest reaches a stage of exhaustion and oxygen starvation so severe that he can no longer move on his own initiative, he is typically left to die. It is simply impossible for one climber to descend such treacherous terrain carrying or dragging the inert body of another. The mountain is littered with the bodies of climbers who have simply sat down and died of exposure. Sibu nearly joined their ranks.
I came at last to the exposed series of ledges at 8,400 metres on which perched a few battered tents. I saw Sibu sitting outside one. I waved to him and he waved back slowly. He looked tired. I assumed he was on his way down from the summit with David and the others. The last fifty metres up to one of the two colour-coded Jagged Globe tents took me twenty minutes, for my oxygen pipe kept snagging on my rucksack but, for the first time, I arrived within a few minutes of Ian, Jens, Neal and Mark. We crawled into our tents tired but exhilarated. After seventy days we were nearly there. The tent was pitched on a slope. The Sherpas had done their best to find a flat spot, but there were none. Ian, my own Sherpa, Boca Lama, and I tried to get ready for our night in the Death Camp, unpacking our rucksacks and checking our oxygen systems without upsetting each other’s space, all in a tiny two-man tent pitched on rocks and ice. Any item that escaped through the entry door was liable to slide, then fall for many thousands of feet to the snow terraces and glaciers below. Various dead bodies had been found in the tents here, including an Indian climber the previous week.
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 32