Last Hours on Everest

by Graham Hoyland

  [T]he decision to sell photographs of Mallory’s body has alienated leading mountaineers. Sir Chris Bonington, who led three expeditions to Everest and reached the summit in 1985, has lost several friends on the mountain. He said: ‘I’m absolutely appalled by this. Words can’t express how disgusted I am. It’s a disgrace. These people don’t deserve to be called climbers.’ The Everest historian Audrey Salkeld, who has been acting as a consultant for Nova, the US television production company which is making a film about the discovery, said: ‘I’m horrified it’s got to this stage. I feel very uncomfortable about it.’7

  I think the American team was surprised by the vehemence of the reaction from George Mallory’s grandson, Bonington and others, but if they had paused for a moment and thought about it they might have desisted. Money was clearly tight but one has to balance gain against integrity. Imagine foreign archaeologists digging up Elvis Presley at Graceland and selling pictures of his corpse. Or excavating and photographing a war hero in Arlington Cemetery.

  It appears that the body could have been treated with greater care during the process of extricating it from the ground. Footage existed that I was never shown, and Wade Davis describes the scene:

  [T]he suggestion that the body was handled with deference is a matter of interpretation. For several hours the search party hacked and gouged the frozen ground with ice axes and knives, prying up the limbs, crudely tearing at the clothing, creating the very cloth fragments later so carefully catalogued as rare specimens at base camp. At one point a climber is seen standing on Mallory’s left leg as he struggles to prop up the torso of the cadaver. ‘He’s almost free, let’s go ahead and free him,’ says one voice. ‘There’s still some more shit here,’ comments another. ‘This is something … I think it’s frozen fucking closed,’ ends another exchange.8

  A rumour suggested that Mallory’s axe was found at some later time near his body, but this has never been accounted for. It remains an open question, and I hope the axe has not been spirited away into a private collection. Using some future technology, Irvine and Mallory’s belongings might give up more clues in the same way that present-day DNA testing has solved past murders.

  I have to admit that I am not blameless in all this. I was guilty of being naive in thinking that involving the media in this story was a good idea. I made a great deal of money for my employers, though. According to Broadcast magazine, my film Lost on Everest became the BBC’s most commercially successful single documentary, but it did me no good at all professionally. I lost the chance of writing a book about my experiences of the 1999 expedition, and my objections about the way my programme proposal had been handled ensured that I was marked down at the BBC as too troublesome to promote. That is the downside of working in a large, hierarchical organisation. Bosses are nervous of people with minds of their own.

  I had learned that Mount Everest could bring out the very worst and very best in people. My proposal had been used to further other people’s interests. As a BBC employee I had no redress, and it cast a blight on the rest of my career. I would warn anyone with a good idea to be very careful whom they speak to.

  The climbing establishment in Britain judged me and seemed to decide I was relatively innocent of disrespect to Mallory and Irvine. In George Band’s book Everest: The Official History, he acknowledges me as the inspiration behind the expedition that found Mallory, but suggests that I have an obsessive, enquiring mind. I hold my hand up to that accusation. However, I would have thought that he, the author of a historical book about a mountain, would be mildly curious about who first climbed it. Band was on the 1953 Everest expedition that claimed the first successful summit, and of course if I had proved that Mallory had climbed the mountain first there would be an awful lot of history to rewrite. I contend that a mild obsession in the right place is acceptable if it harms no one and adds to the sum of human knowledge.

  After the unpleasant experience of the 1999 expedition I sat back and reflected that after all the fuss we hadn’t actually found the camera we were looking for. However, the location of Mallory’s body was very much a hard clue, and pointed to an accident at the ice-axe site. He was near but not actually on the fall line from that point, so the two hard clues tended to corroborate one another. Surely Irvine would be on the same fall line? Maybe further up?

  First of all, though, I was curious about the comparative lack of injury to Mallory. Bodies that have fallen any distance tend to be badly damaged by the trauma of striking unyielding rocks, indeed they often disintegrate. But Mallory looked as if he had only slid a short distance. Did this square with a fall from the ice-axe site? That was at 27,720ft (8,450m), and the body lies at around 26,760ft (8,155m), a vertical height of nearly a thousand feet and a horizontal distance of rather more. I decided I needed an expert opinion.

  I had met Professor George Rodway of the University of Utah College of Nursing on another Everest expedition and immediately took to him. George has a studious manner and a serious approach to evidence, but he is also a hard climber. He is a specialist in high-altitude physiology, and had worked as a search and rescue patrol medic on Denali, a mountain I knew to be a tough proposition. He had seen many bodies in the course of his rescue work on the mountain. I asked him what he deduced from the injuries.

  The body had suffered obvious trauma, which suggested a fall. He had a boot top fracture of both the tibia and fibula on the right leg, a fractured or dislocated right elbow, and an obvious head injury above one eye. He was lying face down and had arrested his fall with outstretched hands after a slide of some unknown distance – his flexed fingers were dug deep into the frozen gravel surrounding him. The search team all suspected that he had survived the initial fall, as the unbroken leg was crossed over the other in a seemingly deliberate manner – very likely in an attempt to ease the pain while waiting for the inevitable.

  Regardless of the injuries the team observed on Mallory, perhaps the most important clue as to the extent of fall itself concerned what wasn’t damaged on his body. Long falls in mountain terrain such as that found on the North Face of Everest (e.g., from high on the North Face near the intersection of the NE Ridge where Irvine’s ice axe was found) typically leave a body very battered, broken, and something rather less than intact – with death not surprisingly almost instantaneous. Mallory’s injuries, however, do not suggest a fall of this nature. The position of the body implies that he was conscious throughout the fall, and for some time after the fall stopped. Because of the nature of the terrain on the North Face of Everest – slopes of approximately 45–55° punctuated by ledges and short vertical drops of several meters – it is in reality somewhat difficult to accurately estimate the actual distance of the fall based on Mallory’s injuries. If one had to estimate what sort of vertical fall onto a rocky landing would have been required to sustain the observed injuries, a mere 7–10 meters might well be a reasonable estimate. Thus, it stands to reason that Mallory’s fall was (very likely) not a tumble over an extremely long vertical distance.9

  Clearly Mallory’s body was a reliable clue, and an oxygen bottle, marked No. 9 and thought to be either Mallory or Irvine’s, was another. Eric Simonson had found this in 1991 at 27,800ft (8,475m) and stowed it under a boulder. On his instructions it had been recovered by Jake Norton and Tap Richards. If the cylinder had not been moved (an important qualification), this would mark the highest point that the British pair had reached, and it suggested that Mallory had taken the ridge route.

  Later, on the same 1999 expedition, Thom Pollard and Andy Politz returned to the body, disinterred it and looked for more artefacts with a metal detector. They found a watch in Mallory’s pocket, but somehow the hour hand fell off between the search site and Advanced Base Camp. This is the problem with this sort of archaeology: observations are not repeatable, as they are in laboratory experiments. The watch glass was missing and the watch had been placed in a pocket, leading some commentators to speculate that Mallory had broken the watch during an attempt
to rock-climb the Second Step. When I saw it the stubs of the hands appeared to point to somewhere between 1:30 and 1:55. The watch had remained wound, and had not run down. This was potentially something of a black-box recorder like those on an aircraft, and it reminded me of John Hoyland’s watch, which seemed to have stopped at the moment of his death. However, as usual with Mallory’s clues, it was tantalisingly ambiguous. We do not know where the watch was broken, or if it stopped when it broke, as breaking the glass doesn’t necessarily stop the movement. Nor did we know whether the time was am or pm. His altimeter exhibited similarly ambiguous rust-stains. Once again, promising clues turned out to be indefinite and vague.

  Then Thom Pollard decided to have a look at Mallory’s face. He crawled beneath the body as Politz lifted it. He reported to me that Mallory had stubble on his chin, that his eyes were closed and there was a hole over his left eye, with two pieces of bone protruding. Otherwise, his face was perfectly preserved.

  Before I was removed from the 1999 expedition I had called my girlfriend on a satellite phone from Everest and agreed to her suggestion that we get married. This inversion of tradition was perhaps a hint that the marriage was going to turn out to be the biggest mistake of my life. On my return we had a romantic wedding. We kept a couple of horses at Ford House by then; mine was an ex-police horse, hers a thoroughbred. We rode Bebington and Mai Li down to the ceremony, and the deed was done.

  I have noticed down the years that there seems to be a paradox in women’s relationships with their male mountaineering partners. The very things that appeared to attract them when they were young, single women – adventure, risk-taking, a free spirit – would often come to be less attractive when they had to live with their partner. Or not live with them. Many of these men were away on trips for half the time and living on the bread-line for the other half. I have seen many male climbers either emasculated by their partners or divorced by them.

  My repeated working trips on Everest did not improve my relationship with my wife, even though it brought home the bacon, and each time I returned from abroad she was increasingly distant. We followed the familiar old trajectory of criticism, defensiveness, contempt and finally stonewalling. In the end our selfishness finished off the marriage.

  Then I heard from Audrey Salkeld, who had interviewed Xu Jing, the deputy leader of the 1960 Chinese expedition. The interview had taken place in 1998 under the watchful eye of an official interpreter, and Audrey realised he wanted to say much more than the interpreter would let him. It was clear to her that Xu Jing had seen Irvine’s body, so in 2000 I returned to the mountain to look for him on one of Brice’s trips, but came back with nothing but a tent pole with a brass sleeve and some faded green canvas from Mallory’s last Camp VI, at 26,760ft (8,140m).

  In 2001 I returned to the north side, post-monsoon, to film David Hempleman-Adams’s attempt to hot-air balloon over the summit. This had been done in two balloons in 1991 by pilots Chris Dewhirst and Andy Elson, but Dave wanted to do it solo. We were ready to go on 10 September 2001, but events overtook us: the events of 9/11. The Chinese authorities told us that they would shoot down any aircraft near their border, so we had to leave. That year, 2001, Jake Norton had found an old woollen mitten at the exit from the Yellow Band at 27,690ft (8,440m). It was dense, with the appearance of felt, was over a foot long, and had probably belonged to Mallory or Irvine.

  In a Sunday Times interview in 2003 Xu Jing then reported that he had seen a body lying in a sleeping bag at 27,300ft (8,320m).10 This seemed odd, as two bags were found in the last camp, and no one in their right mind would carry that weight to the summit. Had he really seen Irvine? In 2004 I went alone to Beijing to film an interview with him for the BBC in the hope of getting a more accurate description of what he had actually witnessed. Mr You Liang Pu did the translation.

  Xu Jing said he was going badly on 5 May and turned back after just 300ft (100m) at around 28,000ft (8,510m). On the way back down he took a more direct route. It was dawn when he found Irvine’s body:

  His body was in a crack one metre wide, with steep cliffs on both sides. As if he was taking shelter, and fell asleep and never woke up. He was facing upwards; his body was blackened but intact. I felt sad and I wanted to cover him. I was at my limit and it was a difficult crack. I couldn’t do anything.11

  Here was another nebulous clue. This time Xu Jing denied the sleeping-bag report. In addition, he said that another climber on the same expedition had noticed something like a rucksack on the side of the route and Xu had investigated, whereas the Sunday Times had reported that Xu was alone. Xu said that Irvine had not been found previously because ‘people don’t go that way anymore.’ This is a convincing detail – the Chinese followed the same route as the early British attempts, straight up the North Ridge without the modern traverse westwards. He didn’t think an avalanche could have swept the body away since 1960 as there was a step just above it. He didn’t think Mallory and Irvine could have climbed the Second Step, as it took four Chinese climbers five hours. He also said that there were some belongings with the body.

  Xu’s report suggested that the body was on the left of the route. Could it be that Irvine survived the fall, traversed east (leftwards viewed from Base Camp) towards the safety of the top camp, and had overshot it in the dark? And so, when the terrain began to ‘cliff out’ above the North Ridge, he sat down to try to survive the night? It was interesting to discover that these early Chinese expeditions had studied the British expedition books closely and had used the original route that went further east, straight up the ridge.

  After this interview I travelled to Mount Everest to join Brice for another search for Irvine, which again proved fruitless. I climbed the North Col with Mark Whetu, and watched while Phurbar Sherpa and several colleagues criss-crossed up the Yellow Band. They could move over that ground as fast as deer stalkers in Scotland, 25,000ft lower. Others from the 1999 trip were also there; I bumped into Dave Hahn and Jake Norton that year. The press tried to make something of this; in the Observer there was a headline declaring ‘Rivals race to solve Everest’s final secret’.12 In fact we shared our knowledge, sitting up there on the North Col. I took some flak for this, but in the end we found nothing. Other interviews with Xu have shown some discrepancies in the altitude of his find. It seemed to me that, as with Odell’s sighting, one had to treat this clue as less than reliable.

  On the way out of Tibet after this expedition I managed to get myself arrested at the Nepal–Tibet frontier. We had all arrived from Base Camp, ready for fun and games in Kathmandu, and shambled into the hut that serves as the Nepali frontier post. I didn’t have a passport photo to stick on my entry form, so I looked at the guide next to me and asked if I could borrow one of his. Unfortunately Chris has a huge, black, Frank Zappa moustache and looks Mexican. I am free of facial hair, and have blue eyes and fair hair. The resemblance was not striking.

  The office babus are terribly self-important in Nepal and the immigration officer was not amused. He looked long and hard at the photograph, then long and hard at me. ‘This is not you,’ he said with chilling accuracy. I protested that high altitude does terrible things to a man but he was not buying it. ‘Lock him up,’ he said to the armed guard. I was thrust into a cell to reflect on my sins for a couple of hours, while he worked through the rest of the queue.

  Then in 2006 I helped Dick Colthurst, who was now working at Tigress Productions, to sell a series to the Discovery channel about Russell Brice’s commercial trips. The working title was a comment on the situation that has developed in recent years – Everest: No Experience Required. In addition to filming, I was on a private mission to test replicas of the clothing Mallory had been wearing when he fell. It was on this expedition that we were all in proximity to a tragedy that seemed to epitomise the modern scene on Everest: the lonely death of David Sharp.

  14

  When Did Everest Get So Easy?

  The queue of brightly suited climbers shuffled forward a few
steps. ‘For God’s sake, move!’ someone yelled from the back. They had already been there for an hour, waiting in the highest traffic jam in the world, just below the Second Step. On many of their faces, between goggles and oxygen mask, you could see that the silent fingers of frostbite were beginning to leave their mark. First, the skin was turning white and waxy; later, these marks would turn purple and swell, forming blisters. But these were just superficial injuries.

  Shivering in the freezing blast of the jet stream near the summit, each of the climbers was effectively dying. They were well into the Death Zone, the height at which it is impossible to live for long. Their blood, already the consistency of syrup after weeks of acclimatising, struggled to pump through the capillaries in their fingers and toes. As a result, muscle, bones and tendons were slowly freezing. Ice crystals were forming inside the cells, growing by extracting the vital fluids and freeze-drying the tissues. Later on, we would see the results: first their digits would appear normal, but blackened beneath the skin. Then blisters would form, filled with bloody fluid. Finally, doctors would decide which fingers and toes to amputate, and which to try to save.

  Another shuffle forward on the foot-wide ledge. The bottleneck was caused by the aluminium ladder that surmounts the Second Step. The problem was that a Chinese climber appeared to be trying to learn how to use his ascending device while balanced on the ladder. Some of the guides in the queue became exasperated by his incompetence and started to push past. The traffic jam started to move. And somehow, everyone in that queue had walked past a dying man without rescuing him – a 34-year-old Briton called David Sharp.