Vanessa Anderson, of the University of Derby, who was responsible for making copies of the shirts and windproofs, had found that body shapes had changed over the intervening 80 years, as well as fashions. She commented:
The fit historically has always been a lot tighter … and that generation were trained to stand very straight-backed and chest out from childhood, as seen in photos of the period. Our posture and sizing has changed. If you try on garments from the Second World War and earlier, the same size will feel a lot tighter.
Because of the hard work of the researchers on and off the mountain, we know exactly what Mallory was wearing. His upper layers started with a silk wool vest next to the skin, then a beige silk shirt, a Shetland-wool pullover, then another silk shirt, green this time, then a flannel shirt. His windproof jacket was a Burberry Everywhere jacket made of Ventile cotton, which was cutting-edge technology for the time. It featured an articulated pivot sleeve that had been patented by Burberry in 1901. This had a deep-cut, V-shaped armpit area, and when I tested the clothing I found one could reach up without pulling the jacket from up around the small of the back.
For his lower body, he had cotton long johns next to the skin, then green Shetland long johns, then brown Shetland long johns, and on top of all this he wore Burberry breeches, matching the jacket. On his feet and lower legs he had a pair of blue socks, then mixed Shetland socks, then Argyle socks and finally Kashmiri puttees. These fine-woollen bandages would have been familiar to all those ex-soldiers but I found them the devil to put on. The whole ensemble was topped off by a fur-lined flying helmet – pure Biggles – and weighed a trifle over 4.5kg, compared with 4.9kg for modern clothing.
There was not enough money to replicate the boots, but these were also high-tech for the day, and at 800g and with no additional crampons they were less than half the weight of the boots and crampons I wore to the summit in 1993. They were to George Finch’s design, and Parsons and Rose found that ‘the thick wool felt boot was overlaid with calfskin and had a 10mm felt mid-sole and a 3mm leather sole. Unlike conventional nailed boots, nails were pre-attached only as deep as the felt mid-sole to avoid heat being conducted by the metal.’2 In fact, those old boots were ideal for the sort of easy-angled mixed ground that lay between Camp VI and the summit, the nails doing the same job as crampons for less weight. The one bit of climbing they would not have been any good for was the rock climbing necessary for surmounting the Second Step.
I asked expedition leader Russell Brice to put on the clothes that he wore to the summit, and he came out of his tent looking like a polar bear. He had fleece underwear and a huge, hooded down suit, several inches thick. As he said: ‘The main problem with climbing Everest nowadays is pissing through a six-inch suit with a three-inch penis.’ But Brice exaggerates; his suit is only four inches thick.
We climbed up on to the glacier near Advanced Base Camp and did some tests. First, I cut some steps with the 1920s ice axe. I immediately found that the layers of silk that I was wearing slid easily against the wool layers, giving me great freedom of movement. Then I reached up and hacked out a hold in the ice above my head. The patented pivot sleeve of the Burberry jacket allowed me a full reach without dragging my shirt-tails out of my breeches. Before too long I was feeling too hot. Not for nothing was this gear developed for polar expeditions. Oddly, these clothes follow the latest fashion for super-lightweight gear.
Brice pointed out that in some ways this outfit, and the nailed boots that went with it, would have been better for climbing the mixed ground of the North Face than today’s clumsy down gear and plastic double boots. Otherwise, modern boots are the greatest clothing advance we now have over our predecessors. Unlike the old leather boots they don’t need to be thawed out in the morning, and during the climb they keep the feet reasonably protected against frostbite. Modern down clothing is around 40 per cent better at insulating, too.
But how would this clothing perform near the summit of the mountain? I had no money to fund an authentic climb using these clothes, and no time to test them more comprehensively. We should try an empirical test by dressing two climbers in this authentic re-created clothing and asking them to climb to the top (the clothes worn by Conrad Anker and Leo Houlding for the 2007 film The Wildest Dream were not true replicas). This real test of the clothing is something I would like to try in the future, if anyone is brave enough. After all, the last two men to try this didn’t come back. So I looked at the science, instead.
At the same time as I was testing Mallory’s clothing the BBC was reconstructing Scott and Amundsen’s journeys in a series called Blizzard: Race to the Pole. Two teams of modern explorers were asked to travel along a snow route using the same resources and clothing available to Scott and Amundsen. Human thermo-regulation expert Professor George Havenith of Loughborough University was asked to compare the British team’s woollen clothing with the Norwegian team’s furs. Although the two sets of clothing had similar insulation properties there was a difference in the friction of the coarse woollens and the slippery furs. Scott’s team, who were man-hauling their sledges instead of relying on dogs, would have expended much more energy simply walking in their gear.
Professor Havenith became interested in Mallory’s clothing when he saw the Mountain Heritage Trust’s display at a conference: ‘I was amazed by the level of detail they had gone into to ensure the clothing was as close a match to that actually worn by Mallory in 1924 as possible.’3 He approached the Trust, offering to assess the insulation and wind protection of Mallory’s clothing, and provide them with further insight into whether what Mallory had worn would have prevented him from reaching the summit of Everest.
As we have seen, the outfit consisted of several different layers of silk, flannel, wool and cotton. The clothing was put on to a human-sized thermal manikin that simulates a human’s skin temperature and is able to measure how much heat is lost through the material.
Through the tests I found that the insulation offered by the many layers Mallory wore was slightly lower than that offered by both Scott and Amundsen’s clothing of 10 years earlier, though the insulative value per unit of weight was about 30 per cent better … If the weather conditions and wind speed on Everest had remained stable on the day Mallory set off for the summit, his clothing would have offered him enough protection from the cold – down to temperatures as low as –30°C – to enable him to reach the top … However the last person who reported seeing Mallory on the mountain commented that the clouds came in and obscured his view of the mountaineer, which appears to suggest that the weather was changing. If the wind speed had picked up, a common feature of weather on Everest, the insulation of the clothing would only just be sufficient to –10°C. Mallory would not have survived any deterioration in conditions.4
The professor was, however, impressed by one feature – the layering:
I had discovered through the research into Scott and Amundsen’s clothing how important correct layering was for the energy cost. With Mallory, each time he wore a coarse layer, for example of wool, he layered it with a slippery fabric, such as silk. When you package these types of fabric together the clothing moves very easily which means the movement of the person wearing the layers is not restricted and energy cost is low. The way Mallory wore his many layers would have made climbing in the overall outfit very easy. If you compare this to Scott’s clothing, his outfit had a lot more friction internally which obviously has an impact on energy consumption and would slow you down. Ergonomically Mallory’s clothing was very well designed.5
Professor Havenith was asked if his study of Mallory’s outfit enabled him to answer the question of whether Mallory reached the summit of Everest.
I think this is still impossible to answer. From the tests I carried out I know that his clothing would have offered him adequate protection as long as the weather remained stable and that Mallory remained active. Any deterioration in the weather conditions or the need to stop and bivouac overnight, and I believe he would h
ave perished … The main thing I think the Mountain Heritage Trust have succeeded in confirming through this project is that Mallory was certainly no amateur. His clothing was advanced for the time and cleverly constructed.6
Tom Holzel claimed that Mallory’s clothing was ‘totally inadequate’, citing the work of Professor Havenith.7 He quotes him thus: ‘If the wind speed had picked up, a common feature of weather on Everest, the insulation of the clothing would only just be sufficient to –10°C (14°F). Mallory would not have survived any deterioration in conditions.’
But this is selective quoting. As we have just seen, what Professor Havenith actually said just before the quoted passage was this:
If the weather conditions and wind speed on Everest had remained stable on the day Mallory set off for the summit, his clothing would have offered him enough protection from the cold – down to temperatures as low as –30°C – to enable him to reach the top.
Is this clothing good enough for going to the top? I am sure it is – in good weather.
Mallory and Irvine were climbing on 8 June – late in the relatively warm pre-monsoon season – and at this time of year some climbers have been able to take off their jacket and part of their down suit, and wear a T-shirt to the top. In May 2007 Dutchman Wim Hoff reached 24,278ft (7,380m) wearing a pair of shorts, and in May 2006 a 25-year-old Nepali Sherpa, Lakpa Tharke Sherpa, took all of his clothes off and was the first to stand naked on the summit. Remember, too, that a few days before Mallory’s attempt Norton and Somervell had come to within 1,000ft of the summit without suffering from hypothermia. Mallory and Irvine, however, did not have good weather. Odell reported ‘a rather severe blizzard’ coming in on the afternoon of 8 June.
I stood on the summit in a 20-knot wind in October 1993, with a lenticular cloud over my head. The temperature was well below –20°C. I was wearing a modern down suit and was barely warm enough. If I had been wearing Mallory’s clothes I don’t think I would have survived the day. Also, I am sure that the clothes of the pioneers – although good enough for climbing hard, when exertion keeps the climber warm – could not have kept Mallory or Irvine alive during a sit-down bivouac at night. Nor would they have survived a bad storm. Mark Whetu, wearing modern down clothing, barely came through his ordeal. And he lost all of his toes.
After the clothing test I felt I had learned a great deal: that the clothing would have been just good enough to wear to the summit in warm, windless conditions but probably could not have kept the climbers alive if bad weather had come in, or if they’d had to spend a night bivouacking on the slopes.
Clearly, the next thing I needed to know was what the weather was doing that day.
19
Perfect Weather for the Job
One thing Professor Havenith had been quoted as saying puzzled me. He said that we didn’t have any weather reports for Mallory’s summit day. I knew that we did, and I knew who had recorded them: Theodore Howard Somervell. He was responsible for the meteorological records on the 1924 expedition, and his work led me to the next vital clue.
One of the reasons Mount Everest is now becoming ‘an easy day for a lady’ is modern weather forecasting. Whereas the early British attempts relied on rough dates for the likely advent of the Indian summer monsoon, now an expedition leader has highly accurate satellite photographs and forecasting available by email. The requisite weather window for a summit bid can be predicted with reliability. But there is one variable that is literally invisible: air pressure.
If one tries to climb Mount Everest without supplementary oxygen some days are better than others. These are high pressure days, when there are more oxygen molecules in each lungful of breath. Conversely, a day with low barometric pressure can effectively make the summit nearly two hundred metres higher. On such a day, a climber nearing the summit without that extra oxygen is working at the absolute limit of human capacity, so a few millibars of atmospheric pressure either way can make all the difference. Somervell was aware of an invisible wall, an apt metaphor for the lack of oxygen that stopped him climbing further.
Even when one is using a standard open-circuit set the bottled oxygen is merely supplementing the ambient air, so low pressure will affect you, too. A recent study of fatalities on Mount Everest shows that deaths blamed on the weather are usually associated with a big drop in summit barometric pressure.1
In my reading of the 1924 expedition account I became curious about the unseasonably bad weather throughout May of that year. The expedition report states that tea planters in Darjeeling claimed ‘that for at least twenty years no such weather had been known at this season’. Usually the cold winds of winter die down towards the end of April and we get a clear week or so around 17 May. But in 1924 they had such appalling weather between 9 and 11 May that they had to abandon Camp III below the North Col, something I have never known in recent seasons. I wondered if there was an outside event that might have influenced the weather, and in particular if El Niño was the culprit.
The phenomenon of El Niño has been much discussed in modern press weather stories. It refers to the periodic movement of warm water in the tropical Pacific from its usual home off Indonesia across to the coasts of South America. This happens around Christmas every few years, which gives the weather pattern its name (El Niño means ‘the little boy’, referring to the infant Jesus). La Niña is a corresponding movement of cooler water. Atmospheric pressure changes go hand in hand with this movement of warm water, an effect known as the Southern Oscillation, and this affects global weather; in particular drought in South Africa, increased Eurasian snowfall and a reduced Indian summer monsoon.
This fits the facts: the eighth-worse drought of the 20th century occurred in South Africa in 1924, and we know from the expedition report that not only was there unusually heavy snowfall in Tibet in May of that year, but also that the monsoon was overdue, enabling Mallory and Irvine to make a late attempt on the summit. What is interesting, in addition, is that this bad weather had similar characteristics to the storm that hit Mount Everest with such disastrous consequences in 1996, as recounted in Jon Krakauer’s best-selling book Into Thin Air.2 But not being a weather scientist, I didn’t understand all of the implications of the bad weather in 1924 until later on.
In 2007 I collaborated on Mount Everest with Professor George Rodway in a study of hypoxia. We filmed arterial blood samples being taken from climbers who were near the summit and found how extraordinarily low oxygen saturation in the blood can become. During one of the inevitable bad-weather days I mentioned my El Niño theory to George and he drew my attention to the work of a Canadian physics professor, Kent Moore of the University of Toronto. So in 2009 I contacted Professor Moore and suggested El Niño might be considered the culprit for the events of 1924. In collaboration with John Semple, also of the University of Toronto, we wrote a paper that produced some surprising results.3 Instead of having unusually good weather for their summit attempt, it turned out that Mallory and Irvine were climbing up into an invisible death-trap. Norton and Somervell, however, had enjoyed an invisible helping hand.
It was all to do with air pressure. The 1924 expedition was remarkable for collecting the earliest data on the meteorology of the Mount Everest region. This was done in a spirit of scientific enquiry, just as Scott had made measurements in the Antarctic. In 1924 there was particular interest in temperature measurements at heights of up to 23,000ft (7,010m), in other words up to Camp IV on top of the North Col. This was so that the environmental lapse rate – the rate at which temperature decreases with height – could be worked out. The air pressure (or barometric pressure) was also noted at Base Camp.
Somervell’s meteorological data from the 1924 expedition was published as a table in 1926, but was not until recently analysed to provide information on the storm that Odell described as ‘a rather severe blizzard’.4 Somervell’s data showed that there was a 10mbar drop in barometric pressure at Base Camp during the storm. This huge drop suggests that the conditions during M
allory and Irvine’s summit attempt were much more severe than originally assumed, with the conclusion being easily reached that the appalling weather might well have contributed to their deaths.
72 years later another disaster was just about to happen. On the evening of 9 May 1996 a large number of clients and guides were poised to make summit attempts, having climbed from Base Camp in Nepal to the camp on the South Col at 25,940ft (7,906m). There had been high winds all day and the chances of summiting appeared low. The winds died down during the evening, though, and everyone thought it would remain calm for a while. As a result, the decision was made to attempt to summit. Instead, the weather was gathering itself up to deliver a terrible punch. During the afternoon of 10 May an intense storm – with wind speeds estimated to be in excess of 70mph, heavy snowfall and falling temperatures – engulfed Mount Everest, trapping over 20 climbers on its exposed upper slopes. Eight of the climbers died, the highest number to die during a single event near the summit of the mountain.
As I learned from a helpful meteorologist cousin in Arran, Daniel Mathew, the winter of 1995–96 was not itself an El Niño year but was sandwiched between the El Niño events of 1994–95 and 1997–98 (the latter being one of the strongest of recent times). Instead, 1995–96 is classified as a La Niña year. Daniel explained that anomalously cooler and wetter conditions over the Himalayas are actually a spring/summer teleconnection of La Niña. (A teleconnection is a linkage between weather changes occurring in widely separated regions of the globe.)
This is all very complicated, but suffice it to say that Mount Everest is occasionally prone to violent and unexpected storms that are connected to cyclical weather events on the other side of the globe. These storms come out of nowhere and they will kill anyone they hit.
Last Hours on Everest Page 23