Last Hours on Everest

by Graham Hoyland

  David Breashears carried a barometer to the summit in 1997 and recorded a pressure of 336.6mbar on a fairly good summit day. If we look at Somervell’s Base Camp barometric readings – other expedition members continued to take readings while Somervell was on the mountain itself – and extrapolate and convert them to millibars to find the pressures on the summit, the minimum summit barometric pressure was approximately 331mbar during the 1924 storm.5 This is the same figure as during the 1996 storm described in Into Thin Air.

  A decrease in summit barometric pressure of just 4mbar is enough to trigger hypoxia (lack of oxygen).6 Clearly both storms were associated with summit barometric pressures and pressure drops that were sufficient to drive the climbers into a hypoxic state.

  The pressure drop was larger and occurred more quickly for the 1924 storm, suggesting that it might have been even worse than the 1996 storm. In 1924 the summit barometric pressure fell from 341mbar on 6 June to 331mbar on 9 June, a drop of approximately 10 mbar, equivalent to an increase of roughly 600ft/180m in effective altitude. This suggests to me that Somervell and Norton had a Camp VI night and a summit day of high pressure, which could partly explain why they got so high without oxygen. The 1996 storm saw the pressure fall from 337mbar on 7 May to 331mbar on 12 May, a drop of approximately 6mbar. So, contrary to Holzel’s claim that Mallory and Irvine had ‘unusually benign circumstances’7 for their climb, they were in fact climbing up into a dead-end. Because of the low pressure, they effectively had a higher mountain to climb.

  I was stunned by these results, and racked my brains for any way in which they could be wrong. Checking the expedition records, however, confirmed the results. I went to the Royal Geographical Society archive and drew out the 1924 Everest Expedition Camp III diary. As I carefully unwrapped it from its paper package, I hesitated. There, 86 years later and in the middle of London, I got a strong whiff of smoke. Yak-dung smoke.

  Inside, the diary had been filled in by various members. Here is Somervell on 11 May: ‘The bloodiest day I have ever seen anywhere – wind, snow, no sun to speak of, almost impossible to live outside.’ Certainly they had rotten weather in 1924. But I was reassured. The way the dates were recorded seems to be unambiguous.

  The pressures actually recorded at Base Camp at 8:30am over the crucial days in 1924 were:

  June 3: 16.375 inches of mercury. Norton and Somervell at Camp VI.

  June 4: 16.275 inches of mercury. Norton and Somervell’s high point.

  June 5: 16.225 inches.

  June 6: 16.5 inches.

  June 7: 16.15 inches. Mallory and Irvine at Camp VI

  June 8: 16.25 inches. Mallory and Irvine’s attempt. The air pressure would have dropped steeply when the storm hit.

  June 9: 15.98 inches of mercury.

  In the weather reports for Mallory and Irvine’s summit day we have:

  June 8: Base Camp. Fine morning, but clouds constantly all around Everest.

  Camp III. Misty morning. Mountain only occasionally in view.

  Camp IV. Cloudy, occasional gusts of wind. Mist, mountain almost entirely obscured, calm and very close. 12.00, calm and very close, 16.00, calm, clouds inclined to lift, patches of dew, etc.

  The barometric pressure is recorded under a table headed ‘June’ and ‘8’ and is recorded as 16.25 inches of mercury, taken at 8:30am: before the storm hit. The next morning it is at its lowest since early May, at 15.98 inches, and the monsoon had clearly set in:

  June 9: Base Camp. Dull sky; very monsoony. Everest clear.

  Camp IV. Clouds and mist, occasional gusts from W. 12.15 clouds and wisps of mist blowing from the W.: close and fairly calm. Mountain occasionally clear. 16.30 clouds, clear to E. Snow on mountain. Wind from W. appears to be of high velocity. Mountain clear. Camp sheltered but wind can be heard above occasionally. Cloudy E.

  By then Mallory and Irvine were almost certainly dead.

  Although the pressure readings at Base Camp on the mornings of 4 and 8 June were almost the same, what is most important is what happened next. For Norton and Somervell, the pressure remained relatively stable, but for Mallory and Irvine, there was a large and rapid drop in pressure. This led me to realise there was an even more seductive and invisible danger at work. Mallory had seen Norton and Somervell get to within 1,000ft of the top on 4 June using no oxygen equipment. It would therefore have seemed reasonable to him to assume that it was possible to reach the summit with the apparatus. What he didn’t know was that the rapidly falling air pressure was effectively making the mountain even higher, and that the incoming blizzard was going to make his clothing very marginal indeed.

  20

  Utterly Impregnable

  Which way did Mallory and Irvine go? Ever since Holzel suggested that they quickly surmounted the Second Step in the time that Odell described, all other Mallory experts have followed suit. After all, it is the way everyone goes today, right? What they forget is that a 15ft (4.6m) ladder was attached to the step by the Chinese in 1975. You have to ask why they did this, if it was so easy that two men wearing 30lb of oxygen equipment could nip up it in five minutes. A combination of ignorance and wishful thinking has perpetuated this myth.

  There were two options open to Mallory, which are reflected in his note to Noel:

  It won’t be too early to start looking out for us either crossing the rock band under the pyramid or going up the skyline at 8.0 p.m.

  So they could have followed the way that Norton and Somervell had pioneered, passing well under the First Step and traversing across the face of the mountain. As it is hard to regain the ridge after the First Step, this route forces climbers to cross to the Norton Couloir.

  Or they could have bypassed the First Step by passing across its northern face and continuing on to the Second Step, which is what Mallory called ‘the skyline’. This is the modern route. Mallory was known to favour this ridge route, which would have meant climbing the Second Step.

  The note implies that he was keeping his two route options open. By the rock band he meant the rocks beneath the summit pyramid (not what is today called the Yellow Band). It was the way Norton and Somervell were heading when they ground to a halt. But if he hoped to get there in a couple of hours he was sadly mistaken; it can take modern climbers up to three times as long from a closer top camp, and using fixed ropes and lighter oxygen.

  It is worth looking at the history of the Second Step, and what the pioneers made of it. The fact is that once they saw it from below, none of Mallory’s peers considered attempting this feature. Every pre-Second World War climber took one look at the crag, traversed under it and followed the same route attempted by all the British pre-war expeditions: the Norton–Somervell traverse. Not one of these pre-war climbers even bothered to climb up to inspect the modern Second Step route: neither Norton, Somervell, Wyn-Harris, Wager, Shipton, nor Smythe, who wrote:

  There was never any doubt as to the best route. The crest of the north-east ridge, leading to the foot of the second step, was sharp, jagged and obviously difficult. As for the second step, now almost directly above me, it looked utterly impregnable, and I can only compare it to the sharp bows of a battle cruiser. Norton’s route alone seemed to offer any chance of success, and it follows the yellow band beneath a sheer wall to the head of the great couloir.1

  Only Jack Longland, the rock-climber, thought it might go, and even he wouldn’t have tried to get young Irvine up it. Irvine had only climbed at V. Diff (5.7, using the US rating scale) level on Great Gully on Craig yr Ysfa with Odell. This, a wet climb at sea level, was rather different to the Second Step.

  Furthermore, while on leave in Britain, Somervell met Frank Smythe to discuss the forthcoming 1936 Everest expedition and said that he thought it might be possible to place a camp in the Great Couloir that Norton had reached in 1924. This suggests that even at that date they were still concentrating on the Norton traverse.

  The Second Step was finally climbed by the Chinese expedition of 1960 in an epic ascent involvin
g pitons (that Mallory did not have), five hours of struggle and badly frostbitten feet (when one climber took off his boots and stood on a companion’s shoulders). It was considered so difficult that the British initially refused to believe that they had actually done it. When they returned in 1975 the Chinese brought their aluminium ladder.

  In support of the argument that the Second Step might have been surmounted in 1924, we might mention the fact that Oscar Cadiach, a Spanish climber, free-climbed the Step in 1985, although in that year there was the aid of a convenient snow ramp, which Mallory did not have. So too did Theo Fritsche, an Austrian climber, taking an hour in 2001 in dry conditions similar to those of 1924. But the Chinese ladder was standing there, providing at least moral support.

  On our expedition of 1999 Conrad Anker climbed the step but had to use one rung of the ladder. I watched the rushes of his climb, and he was only forced to use the ladder because that rung blocked the only available foothold. He graded it ‘a solid 5.10’, far beyond what was being achieved by Mallory’s contemporaries at sea level, and at that time he thought it was beyond Mallory’s abilities. In his 1999 book Last Explorer Anker made it clear that he didn’t think the pair had got to the summit, citing the extreme difficulty of the Second Step, their lack of crampons and a fixed rope, oxygen sets that weighed twice as much as modern ones, no climbing aids such as pitons, and inadequate clothing.

  And what about rock-climbing capabilities of the boots that the two men were wearing? They were large, leather, alpine monstrosities, only lightly nailed to avoid too much heat loss from the feet. David Breashears said to me: ‘Look at his boots. There’s no way he would have tried the Second Step wearing those.’

  Others disagree. In Anthony Geffen’s The Wildest Dream, a ‘documentary’ film made in 2007, you will see Conrad Anker and Leo Houlding, both top rock climbers of the modern era, climbing the Second Step without the Chinese ladder in place. The film set out to prove that Mallory and Irvine had climbed the mountain, perhaps because it is a far more sensible commercial idea for a film of this type to represent success rather than failure. The problem is that if the ‘reconstructed’ events are twisted to make a film sell, audiences can become confused about historical truth. That said, as a film-maker myself I do understand the financial temptations to tell a good story.

  Some of the reconstructions in The Wildest Dream are not signposted as such, for example the model of Mallory’s dead body, so it is sometimes unclear what is real and what is faked. The modern climbers are seen wearing old-style clothes, but they are not the exact replicas that I had worn on the mountain the previous year. This is an important point in film-making, where drama-documentary begins to blunt the sharp edges of truth. Even if the Second Step had been climbed in the way portrayed in the film, then I still cannot see Mallory and the unskilled Irvine getting up it laden with 30lb oxygen sets in the weather that Odell described. And there is a hidden reason for this.

  In the course of preparing for the filming, Houlding and Kevin Thaw had removed the ladder from the Second Step and attempted it without any aid – just as Mallory and Irvine would have done. Later, Houlding graded it 5.9, or Hard Very Severe in the grading used by Mallory: distinctly difficult with 1920s heavy oxygen systems and lightly nailed big expedition boots at extremely high altitude – but perhaps just possible.

  However, the film-makers missed a crucial point in their study of the rushes. Houlding and Thaw reported to mountaineering historian Ken Wilson that there was no belay point for Mallory to fix his rope below the Step to protect himself on the hardest part. In other words, there was no place where Irvine could have secured their thin cotton rope to safeguard Mallory if he had fallen off while climbing the Step – and if Mallory had fallen it risked taking Irvine off, too, meaning certain death for the pair of them.

  Mallory was a married man with children, and the question is this: would he have pushed his luck with a novice with no solid belay below him, even with such a glittering prize above him? The consensus among traditional climbers who know the old style of climbing seems to be no, he wouldn’t. One of the cardinal rules of climbing at the time was ‘The leader must not fall.’

  Unfortunately there is not one scintilla of evidence to prove that the Second Step route was climbed in 1924, and the fact is that all the pre-war expeditions followed the lower route. I think the likelihood is that Mallory would have done the same as his peers, or perhaps turned back after examining the possibilities of the Step.

  As a footnote to the Second Step controversy, I suggested in a Royal Geographical Society talk after my clothing tests in 2006 that the Norton–Somervell route might have had more going for it than was realised. After all, Reinhold Messner took this route when he made his extraordinary first solo ascent of the mountain in August 1980. Messner was an admirer of Norton and Somervell’s alpine-style attempt, and he proved that the route could be done without oxygen.

  From the position on the ridge where their oxygen bottle No. 9 was found, Mallory and Irvine could have struck off across the mountain on the same traverse that Bill Wager and Wyn-Harris had taken, and arrived at the Norton Couloir in much the same place as Norton and Somervell. There is good evidence from book annotations that those early pioneers thought that there was an exit from the Couloir onto the Third Step. This is not a direct route, but it would have avoided the Second Step.

  Perhaps the consummate route-finder Mallory found a way around the puzzle that eventually took a Chinese ladder to solve but, as we have seen, he had more against him than he realised.

  21

  What Was in His Mind?

  What were Mallory’s thoughts in those last hours? This is perhaps the hardest question of all to answer satisfactorily, and the waters have been muddied by those who have sought to portray him as emblematic of some kind of quest. An answer has to be attempted, though, if we are to make sense of him as a man.

  We have seen something of his upbringing, his character, the achievements of his peers and the effect that the First World War had on him. We know that he was on the brink of pulling off a feat that would have made him famous and ticketed for life. We also know that he was a family man who was leading a novice, and that he was probably not inclined towards performing a suicidal stunt. On the other hand he had a record of leading others into danger when success was near; Geoffrey Winthrop Young had warned him that he was prone to sweeping ‘weaker brethren’ along, beyond their abilities. Then there was the guilt of the disaster of 1922 still preying on his mind, and the frustration with the bad weather that had led to ill-considered dashes in 1924.

  All in all there would be many competing motives pulling in different directions, as well as the supreme struggle of the climbing itself. So how would these various tugs have resolved themselves in his mind?

  For more on his psychology I turned again to Audrey Salkeld, the most tireless chronicler of the Mallory years, and the person most likely to know what drove the man. In her monograph ‘George Mallory: where was he going?’ she makes a number of points.

  The first is that when he died, his sisters suspected that even his parents didn’t understand who he really was. His death was so symbolic that it was swiftly hijacked by the mystery-makers and his true nature was quickly obscured. The memorial service for Mallory and Irvine at St Paul’s Cathedral in London on 17 October 1924 was the first and only time British mountaineers have been honoured in such a way. King George V and the Prince of Wales attended, and the Bishop of Chester intoned these words:

  that last ascent, with the beautiful mystery of its great enigma, stands for more than an heroic effort to climb a mountain, even though it be the highest in the world.

  A beautiful mystery indeed, and you can almost hear the angels’ trumpets. We might be criticised for trying to destroy a wonderful fairy tale, but the truth is surely more important. In our favour is the perspective given by the passage of time. We also possess just about every word that Mallory wrote, and it is in his writings that we
get a glimpse of his true hopes and interests.

  Salkeld points out that although his name is now inextricably tied up with a mountain, George Mallory was not exclusively a mountaineer, and indeed compared with modern-day career climbers his climbing was episodic. He had wide-ranging interests, and had big plans for the future. As we have seen, he was something of a late developer, and went up to university as a rather innocent idealist, probably expecting to follow his father into the Church. Cambridge, however, changed all of that. He fell headlong into a whirl of free thought and freer lovers, and got to know some of the foremost thinkers of the day, such as the Keynes, the Stracheys and other members of the Bloomsbury set, whose liberal views appealed to his sense of fair play.

  From his tutor A. C. Benson he imbibed the value of a wide-ranging education, freed from the shackles of compulsory sport and classics, and he arrived at Charterhouse as an idealistic young schoolmaster eager to try out his ideas. Ideals collided with reality – for example when his pupils sat on his head – but he steadily learned how to be an effective master and, just as Graham Irving had done when Mallory was his pupil at Winchester, he started to take some of the boys climbing. This was a key moment. Salkeld says:

  George began taking selected boys to Snowdonia in the school holidays to join Geoffrey Winthrop Young’s ‘Hill Company’. Young saw himself as a kind of missionary, dedicated to converting some of the greatest brains and sportsmen of the age to a love of mountains. After energetic days on the hills, evenings would be for theatricals, singing and competitive feats. The idea of introducing teenagers to adventurous activity, combining this with personal expression and wide-ranging conversation formed the kernel of a new kind of school George, Geoffrey and David Pye were keen to promote. Geoffrey in time would help Kurt Hahn set up Gordonstoun, based on a similar ethos, but by then of course George had been dead for almost a decade.