Their relationship has had its ups and downs. Bonington remembers her being “a bit of a battle-axe” in the early ’70s but says she has definitely softened and has contributed a great service to the mountaineering community in sharing information and going the extra mile to help. He recalls their interviews as “very intense” because she knew the terrain and was precise in her questioning. One of the star climbers on the Everest expedition, according to Bonington, was Pertemba Sherpa. A frequent partner of Bonington’s, Pertemba told Elizabeth some years later that he had since been forbidden to climb by his wife, who was afraid he would be killed. But, says Elizabeth, “He’s snuck in an expedition or two since then!”
As excited as she was about the British Everest Southwest Face Expedition, Elizabeth wasn’t allowed to report on it, because she was still being punished for her earlier indiscretions. She was learning the fine art of patience – and diplomacy. It would take her a while. The reporting ban was not the last time Elizabeth would run into trouble with the authorities. The next would be much more serious.
CHAPTER 10
A Break with the Past
Two mountaineers from Austria and Italy have conquered Mount Everest without oxygen for the first time....
— Elizabeth Hawley
The political face of Nepal changed again when the king accepted his prime minister’s resignation in September 1977. Later in the year, B.P. Koirala, the former prime minister who had assumed power shortly after Elizabeth’s arrival in Nepal and who had been imprisoned or in exile for much of the time since then, returned to Asia from the United States, where he had been receiving medical attention. His arrival in India elicited a warm reception from his old supporters, who were now in power in India. This irritated the Nepalese authorities. When Koirala arrived in Nepal he was promptly arrested. He was later acquitted on five of the seven charges brought against him, and the two remaining ones were postponed indefinitely because the prosecution’s evidence was incomplete.
Elizabeth was shocked at Koirala’s physical state. He appeared thin and weary. She hoped he and the king would get together and find a way to solve what she saw as a process fraught with endemic problems – the endeavour to combine democracy with a hierarchical system of family relationships. She recalled how diplomats and other foreigners would send invitations to Nepalese notables and then be insulted when they never received a reply. But the invitees couldn’t answer, because they never knew whether their father, uncle or someone else would suddenly demand that they be somewhere else. She realized it was unrealistic to think the road to democracy would be smooth.
In fact, there was greater unrest in Nepal now than at any time in the last 50 years. Even when the Rana family had been relieved of power, Kathmandu had remained peaceful. The cause of the current unrest was hard to pinpoint, but seemed to be a combination of general discontent with inflation and corruption; unfulfilled – and rising – expectations; and the restlessness of youth. By the spring of 1979, student demonstrations had taken a violent turn. In the southern town of Hetauda, three people died when police opened fire on them. Following that violence, many leading politicians were arrested and Koirala was again placed under house arrest.
The king swiftly defused the unrest by announcing a referendum to determine whether to keep the present panchayat system under which political parties were forbidden, or to establish a multiparty system similar to what existed before his father ended it in 1960. This was considered an amazing announcement, since, from the very moment he ascended the throne in 1972, this very king had insisted that the panchayat system was permanent. Political manoeuvring began immediately, with leaders campaigning for or against a new system. Political activity that had been dormant or clandestine for two decades now burst into the open. Sporadic violence occurred. A group of men and women tried to assassinate Koirala by rolling boulders down a steep hillside toward his car. Uninjured in the incident, Koirala was nevertheless shaken by it, citing the dangers of the upcoming referendum. Some of those dangers, he believed, were coming from outside the country, as there was foreign interest in sabotaging the referendum and creating instability in a country that lay strategically between China and India. The king was undoubtedly aware of this too, and he made official visits to both India and China, emphasizing his country’s good relations with both.
The referendum was held in 1980. Elizabeth was convinced that many voters would not understand what they were voting for or against, confusing the issues of multiparty vs. panchayat with problems of corruption, inflation, bureaucracy and monarchy. Reporters flocked to Nepal to see what would happen. Despite the violence of the previous year, the referendum was peaceful. Long lines of voters had formed by 7:00 a.m., more than two hours before the polls opened. Seeing the huge voter turnout, Elizabeth was sure it signalled a switch to a multiparty system. But when all the results were in, the panchayat system had won – narrowly – with 55 per cent of the votes. With such a narrow margin of victory, it was clear that some kind of constitutional change was needed, so the king announced he would consult with various leaders on the nature and timing of reform.
The process of consultation produced many additional layers of administrative structure. The grander the machine became, the greater number of resources were required to maintain it. In a country as poor as Nepal, Elizabeth thought it preposterous that this self-perpetuating bureaucratic organ could occupy so much money, time, ink and effort when it appeared to be largely insensitive to what was going on in the rest of the country. With rapid and frequent changes in the top political positions, actually making a decision was one of the most dangerous things a senior politician could do. Commissions and councils resorted to delegating decision-making up, and up – ultimately to the king, where the sheer volume of decisions often resulted in stagnation. The paternal nature of this kind of rule flew in the face of genuine democratic reform, but it was a fact of life in Nepal – deeply rooted in the national character of patriarchal dependency.
The government’s preoccupation with reform may have contributed to its reluctance to decide the fate of Elizabeth’s journalist accreditation. Although the ban hadn’t stopped her from doing the annual mountaineering reports, she was cut off from the excitement of a potential journalistic scoop. She heard rumblings from her Nepali journalist friends that the decision would be reversed, giving her the freedom to work again, but the decision was slow in coming and the waiting was frustrating. After more than a year, the prime minister and the king finally came to an agreement to renew her licence, just in time for the 1976 spring climbing season.
Elizabeth’s work with mountaineering expeditions was growing and looked likely to continue to do so in the future, as the Nepalese government announced it would grant a total of 26 permits for the 1978 season. This would be by far the greatest number of permits issued for one season. The most interesting of the spring expeditions was that of two men attempting to climb Everest without supplementary oxygen. The two were Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler.
The climbers reached the summit without incident – or bottled oxygen – and with a small movie camera to record the historic event. Some people expressed doubts that they had not succumbed to dipping into the oxygen supplies at the South Col, but other team members later checked the supplies and found them to tally perfectly with the amount recorded prior to their ascent. Others were concerned over the anticipated “brain damage” the two would experience, but a physician who examined them after their descent found them to be tired but in excellent physical and mental condition, except for Messner’s painful eye condition caused by removing his sunglasses while filming on the summit ridge.
Elizabeth’s Reuters account announced: “Two mountaineers from Austria and Italy have conquered Mount Everest without oxygen for the first time.…” She went on to add that this climb should settle once and for all the debate over whether humans could survive without oxygen at such rarified heights. But it didn’t – as she soon found out.
After Messner and Habeler’s ascent of Everest, a strange situation arose in Kathmandu. Some Sherpas called a press conference to denounce Messner as a liar. They didn’t believe his claim to have climbed without bottled oxygen, asserting he had hidden tiny bottles of oxygen under his down jacket and had breathed it all the way to the top. It became clear to Elizabeth that the Sherpas believed that if they couldn’t do it, nobody could. At the press conference she noticed it was “Messner this and Messner that.” She challenged the Sherpas with “what about Peter Habeler?” No answer. She realized they didn’t like Messner – at all. He was perceived as condescending and demanding – “get my food, get my sleeping bag” – and they were determined to give him a hard time in return.
The fall season brought an all-women’s team to Annapurna led by American climber Arlene Blum. Elizabeth had met Arlene before and was intrigued by her. This time Arlene was taking on a much more onerous role as leader, and Elizabeth expressed to her mother that she was glad she wasn’t going with them. After making the first American ascent of Annapurna I, the expedition came to a tragic end when two members of the second ascent team fell to their deaths on October 17, 1978. There was speculation in various publications about whether their deaths could have been prevented if other (male, it was implied) climbers had been with them, but Elizabeth thought that the two who died were experienced and knew what they were doing, and that the nature of their fall would not have been prevented by having more people around. She responded to criticism of Arlene Blum not going high on the mountain with the logical observation that expedition leaders often do not go high on the mountain, due to their logistical responsibilities down low. All of this was captured in a long piece about the expedition that Elizabeth submitted to People magazine.
This era in climbing, which began in the late ’70s, saw an increasing number of experienced and often smaller expeditions attempting, and sometimes succeeding on, significantly difficult objectives – new routes on previously climbed peaks as well as unclimbed peaks. This was a marked shift away from the large, siege-style expeditions that had produced notable successes on routes such as the Southwest Face of Everest. Now climbers began to bring a new, lightweight aesthetic to the Himalaya. They came from Britain, the United States, Yugoslavia and Japan. Some of the most experienced climbers almost lived in Nepal now, going from one mountain to the next, seemingly having abandoned their lives back home in favour of the forbidding Himalayan faces. Many were familiar to Elizabeth and a few she counted as her friends.
In 1979 one of the most impressive of the spring’s mountaineering objectives was a Yugoslav effort on a new route on the true West Ridge of Everest, which forms the border between Nepal and China. The team was led by Tone Škarja and included strong climbers like Andrej and Marko Štremfelj and Viktor Grošelj. They found the difficult climbing was sustained almost to the top, and the entire route was exposed to horrific winds. However, five climbers reached the summit on this impressive effort.
British climber Doug Scott was back with a small team that included Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker to attempt a new route on the 8586-metre Kangchenjunga from the glacier northwest of the peak. Not only were they trying a new route, they were doing it without oxygen or radios and they limited their support to two Sherpas. The four team members had a total of more than 20 Himalayan expeditions under their belt, so they were well qualified for the task. After 10 weeks, two serious summit attempts, frighteningly high bivouacs and variable weather, they reached the summit in time for sunset on May 16.
The beautiful and remote, twin-summited Gaurishankar, located on the frontier between Nepal and Tibet, had just been opened to climbing after a 20-year ban, with the provision that any climb be a joint effort with Nepalese climbers. At 7134 metres, it was one of the last major unclimbed summits in the Nepal Himalaya. Its two revered summits represented two Hindu deities: Gauri, goddess of love; and Shankar, god of destruction. Not only was it remote, its approaches were largely unexplored since the Japanese reconnaissance in 1959, and it was expected to be tremendously difficult. Al Read of Mountain Travel put together a formidable team including Nepal’s most experienced Sherpa, Pertemba Sherpa, and America’s most experienced Himalayan climber, John Roskelley.
Once on the mountain, the climbers changed their route a couple of times, once because the border delineation with China changed, making the Northwest Ridge part of Tibet, and once because the West Face looked slightly more feasible than their other ridge alternative. Extremely difficult climbing at high altitude, rockfall, threatening ice bulges, aid climbing on shifting pitons and uncomfortable camps were the norm, but on May 8 Roskelley and Dorje Sherpa fought their way to the summit. The last great Himalayan summit in Nepal had been climbed.
It was during this time that Elizabeth became better acquainted with Roskelley, a young, somewhat controversial climber from Spokane, Washington. Since his 1973 Dhaulagiri expedition, he had been racing up peaks in the Soviet Union, Bolivia, India, Pakistan and Nepal. Roskelley was a professional climber, so logically he should have been interested in having as much publicity for his climbs as possible. But he was a private person and didn’t like the fact that Elizabeth’s Reuters reports were being picked up by newspapers everywhere, particularly back home in Spokane, where he avoided talking about his plans. It embarrassed him, as he described his motivation as “just to go with some friends and do a good climb.” But Elizabeth did report on his climbs and her reports undoubtedly helped his career. She understood the significance of his achievements, although she wouldn’t tell him directly, saying to him only that he had done a “worthwhile ascent – not a great ascent.” And that was fine with him. He accepted her taciturn style, partly because it reminded him of his father, who was also an old-school journalist.
A climbing event that made a big impression on Elizabeth was the death of Hannelore Schmatz in 1979. Her husband, Gerhard Schmatz, was the leader of the Everest expedition and Hannelore was in charge of the logistics and trekking arrangements. She was not a terribly experienced climber, according to Elizabeth, but she did reach the summit with about nine other team members. It was on the descent that she died from exposure and exhaustion. Her body would be seen for years to come, lying beside the trail of the normal South Col–Southeast Ridge route, providing an unnerving sight because her head and upper torso were completely out of the snow. Climbers reported that her eyes appeared to follow them as they approached and passed her. Elizabeth remains caustic in her assessment of Gerhard Schmatz: “It didn’t seem to unnerve her husband. He found consolation with somebody else, another woman.” Elizabeth characterized Hannelore as a “hard-working woman,” perhaps not with the charm of the beautiful French climber Chantal Mauduit, or the skill of Polish climber Wanda Rutkiewicz, but nevertheless a determined climber. “Her determination got her up the mountain, but not down.”
Then, on October 25, 1979, Elizabeth was awakened by a telephone call from the airport saying that a radio message had come through from the New Zealand expedition on Ama Dablam requesting a rescue helicopter. Peter Hillary was on that team, and she agonized for several hours until she saw Peter emerge from the helicopter with a broken arm, cracked rib, broken finger and sprained ankle. She shuddered to think of how Ed Hillary would have handled yet another death in the family. The team had been hit by falling ice; luckily, however, a predominantly Austrian team was nearby and came to their rescue. On that team was Reinhold Messner, who, much to Peter Hillary’s chagrin, not only rescued him but left with Hillary’s Canadian girlfriend! Elizabeth found this amusing.
From the other end of the world, another accident, again connected with the Hillary family, was reported. An Air New Zealand sightseeing flight in Antarctica crashed and initial reports claimed that Ed Hillary was on it. They were mistaken. But although Hillary was safe, his good friend and climbing partner Peter Mulgrew was on the flight and was killed. Elizabeth had met Mulgrew’s wife, June, several times in Kathmandu and knew she would be devastate
d. Already on the board of directors for the Himalayan Trust, June began spending much more time in Nepal, working on the trust’s projects, supporting Hillary in his work and becoming close to him in the process. Eventually, June Mulgrew became Hillary’s second wife.
CHAPTER 11
Great Achievements
When I came with crazy ideas to Kathmandu, she was listening – she never said it was impossible.
— Reinhold Messner
The early ’80s saw some exciting new developments and notable climbing achievements in Nepal: winter climbs, difficult face climbs, a solo climb of Everest. According to Elizabeth, a few leading personalities stood out, and they made her work rewarding.
One of those characters was the Polish climber Andrzej Zawada, whom Elizabeth remembered as tall, courtly and charming. Polish climbers were the first to climb to a height of over 7000 metres in winter in 1973 on the 7492-metre Noshaq, and they did it again in 1974 when they reached 8250 metres on Lhotse. In both cases, Zawada was leading. Zawada was a great innovator, the first to approach the Nepalese government about opening a winter climbing season; and for the 1979–80 season, he convinced the ministry to open Everest in winter.
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