White Limbo: The Classic Story Of The First Australian Climb Of Everest

by Hall, Lincoln

  A short way past the site of the old Japanese camp the towers and walls of ice became a maze impossible to walk through. We scrambled back to the edge of the glacier. The problem there was continual rockf all from the hillside above. The danger was not so much from being hit by falling rocks—alert ears and eyes avoided that—but of the unstable rocks underfoot. Rocks had been dumped on the slowly moving glacier by landslides. As the glacier groaned over the irregularities of the valley floor the piles of rocks were continually readjusting. Any rock that was stepped on was likely to roll over, pitching one headlong onto more loose boulders. The result could easily be a twisted ankle or an arm broken in an attempt to break the fall. Towards the end of the expedition Howard stumbled and fell heavily and, though he did not realise it at the time, broke three ribs.

  Beyond that dangerous area we cut back out towards the centre of the glacier. A few steep ice hills covered with loose moraine were the only obstacles. Past them lay open ground where it was easier to walk. A gradual slope led to the place where we decided to pitch Camp I, at 5750 metres. Changtse rose above for 2000 metres in a steep, uninterrupted and almost vertical face of ice and rock. We decided that it was too steep to hold enough snow for dangerous avalanches. Since the North Face of Everest was still a couple of kilometres distant there was little fear of our camp being damaged by the huge avalanches which undoubtedly sometimes fell from there.

  On one of the several days we spent carrying loads from Advance Base to Camp I the whole of the western side of the North Face avalanched. We were returning to Advance Base when the snow slope at 7500 metres separated from the mountain in a huge slab avalanche with a fracture-line several kilometres wide. Howard and Greg, who were furthest down the valley, had a particularly good view and watched the cloud of powder snow blown in front of the avalanche dust the whole area of Camp I. The conclusion we all reached was that it would be suicidal to be anywhere near the base of the Face after a big snowfall. It was another case of concentrating upon the task at hand, stocking Camp I, while the monsoonal storms exhausted themselves.

  The yak herders were easily persuaded to make their beasts carry some of our supplies up the glacier to the Japanese camp site. Beyond there it was impossible for yaks to travel. Having a depot of supplies on the glacier was a great help as it meant we could stay at Camp I and fetch supplies from the depot as we needed them. The round trip took only a couple of hours.

  Before moving up to Camp I we decided to reward ourselves for the hard work of load carrying with the hard work of exploring the country near Advance Base. Geof, Greg, Andy and Colin headed up the East Rongbuk while Tim, Tenzing and I crossed the main Rongbuk and climbed the western side of the valley. Our aim was to look into the valleys to the west and to amuse ourselves with some skiing.

  The ridge we climbed from the glacier was, like everywhere around us, piled with loose boulders. Occasional low bluffs provided opportunity to practise my rockclimbing skills. I soon noticed that the granite boulders were studded with garnets, usually tiny but sometimes the size of a fingernail. Tim found a lump of white granite the size of a cricket ball which was studded with the large red crystals.

  “A good paperweight,” he said as he put it in his pack.

  Unfortunately the weather frustrated our skiing plans. The first evening we had good views of the North Face. Since our camp was ten kilometres away at 6000 metres there was less of the foreshortening which had distorted the mountain from the lower and closer vantage points of Advance Base and Camp I. Tim, Tenzing and I sat staring at the huge Face, stunned by the enormity of the task we had set ourselves.

  “It’s only a thousand metres higher than Annapurna II,” I said tentatively, in an attempt to reassure myself.

  “You worry too much,” said Tim.

  Soon the clouds which had been darkening the valley all day rolled in and snow began to fall. It snowed virtually non-stop for the next thirty hours. For that time we lay in our tiny tent reading and sleeping; eating breakfast at three in the afternoon to stretch our one day’s food supply into two. The next day it was still snowing so we were obliged to descend. The loose boulders covered with thirty centimetres of fresh snow made the going very hard. As soon as we were back down on the glacier the weather began to clear. The sun shone half-heartedly, but strongly enough to inflict snow-blindness on poor Tenzing. He had been half an hour later than us in donning his sunglasses. The thin atmosphere at 5500 metres was not very effective in filtering the harmful rays of the sun.

  When we were sitting around on the grass back at Advance Base I showed Greg the garnet-infested rock that Tim had found, and asked for his professional geologist’s opinion. He turned the piece of white granite in his hands as he searched for words to describe it.

  “Garnets aren’t found in granite when it’s first formed,” he said, as he rubbed his fingers over the rock. “It shows that the granite’s been intensely compressed, probably when the Himalaya was being formed. It’s real mother of the earth stuff, this.”

  I began to share some of his awe. Yet to my mind it was appropriate that the immense forces of nature should be apparent in the smallest details around us. After all, above us as we talked soared the incredible bulk of Mt Everest, testimony of a creation mightier and more lasting than humankind.

  In a world of ice and snow it was ironic that the heat was intolerable. As we plodded slowly up the glacier towards the North Face we felt like insects attracted to a candle flame—wings burnt, unable to escape the extreme heat. The sun’s rays intensified as they reflected down from the brilliant white walls of snow and ice that rose for thousands of metres in every direction. Little of the sun’s radiation had been absorbed by the thin atmosphere at 6000 metres, making the heat intense.

  Our path was a shallow gully in the glacier. On both sides huge crevasses gaped uninvitingly, though we knew that inside they would be cool. We reached the lip of the gully where the glacier levelled out onto the shelf leading with a scarcely discernible rise to the base of the North Face. Gratefully we drank in the slight breeze which blew across the shelf. As we were on skis Tim and I were ahead of the others. It seemed like a good place to wait so we dropped our packs onto the snow and flopped on top of them.

  Geof, Greg and Andy arrived roped together. Without skis they were much more likely to break through the firm crust of snow into hidden crevasses beneath. In this event it was probable that only Geof, who was in the lead, would fall, leaving Greg and Andy to pull him out. The rope was a safeguard for our first journey to the nevé of the glacier. Having judged the glacier to be safe, we dispensed with the precaution of ropes for subsequent journeys.

  Our purpose that morning was to get closer to the mountain and choose the best line up the Face. Rather than carry empty packs we had each brought some food and climbing gear, and now we needed to cache it in a spot that would not be buried by a heavy snowfall or an avalanche. We had learnt that lesson well. There was some disagreement as to which was the safest place, but finally we decided to leave everything in a kitbag on the edge of a large crevasse. To distinguish it from our dump of gear below Camp I, we called the depot the Stash.

  I dumped my load and skied the hundred metres back to where we had first sat. It was there that the breeze was freshest. Meanwhile, Greg had unroped and plodded a few hundred metres further towards the Face. Though his figure grew smaller and smaller he seemed to be getting no closer to the mountain. The illusion helped the rest of us appreciate the incredible scale of our objective. At least from here we could distinguish some detail, and that helped destroy the air of unassailability which more distant views had given.

  I sat on my empty pack and stared at the mountain. The problem was to select a route which offered the least possible threat of avalanche. Several spurs gave dimension to the lower part of the Face. The obvious choice was to climb one of those. Above, a huge slab of snow almost eight hundred metres high stretched in an unbroken sweep from the North Col across to the West Ridge. It was fro
m there that the huge avalanche had fallen the previous week. It was a danger-zone we would have to treat very cautiously. On the slab itself, we would minimise risks by plotting our route between the shelter of the large rocks (only specks on the snow from where I sat) which dotted the slope at very infrequent intervals.

  Andy had already christened the dangerous slab White Limbo. The name was familiar to us from one of our favourite tapes. The song “White Limbo” by Australian Crawl had nothing to do with mountains. Yet Limbo, as a no-man’s land somewhere between heaven and hell, seemed an apt name for the feature which threatened to lower half of the mountain with avalanche. Whether we would know the success of the summit or the hell of an icy death lay in part with the whims of White Limbo’s avalanche-prone slopes.

  Above White Limbo were two weaknesses through the steep rock. To the right was the Hornbein Couloir, first climbed by an American team who had traversed in from the West Ridge, and repeated in 1980 by the Japanese North Face expedition. Since we wanted to climb a new route we were left with the second option, the Great Couloir. Only the Couloir’s top half was safe for climbing. Huge ice cliffs over two hundred metres high threatened the lower slopes with enormous ice avalanches.

  Greg returned. “It looks fantastic,” he said. “I thought there’d be avalanche debris all the way along the bottom of the Face, but it’s as clean as a whistle.”

  “Good news,” I said.

  Tim, Geof and Andy had emptied their packs. Andy started back down to Camp I while Tim and Geof joined Greg and me.

  “What do you reckon?” asked Tim.

  “The Japanese route looks good,” said Geof.

  “Yes, but it’s been climbed,” countered Greg. “If we could pull off the line to the right of the ice cliffs it would be a real coup. A new route on Everest would be really something.”

  “It sure would,” I said. “And apart from that it’s the safest route on the Face.”

  Geof looked at the relevant part of the mountain for a few moments.

  “It could be difficult getting through the rock below the big snow slab.”

  “That’s some of the attraction,” said Tim.

  Geof nodded, then said, “I don’t mind hard climbing but the advantage of the American route to the left, as far as they got, is that it’s easy, and that means you have more strength left for the top.”

  I disagreed. “The line to the right of the ice cliffs is much shorter than the American route, and with this much snow around, much safer. Besides, harder climbing knocks your head into shape. Near the summit, where the lack of oxygen is at its worst, it would be a great help psychologically to tell yourself that the climbing below was harder than what you still have left to do.”

  Greg returned to the practicalities of the route. “I think that the obvious access to the middle of the Face is no good. Traversing left across the mixed ground could be hard. It looks reasonably safe to climb those avalanche funnels beneath the obvious rib.”

  “It might be safe,” Tim said. “We’ll have to have a close look.”

  “It could be worth climbing up above the icefall here beside us to get a different perspective.”

  “Time enough for that, Geof. Let’s ski down and have some lunch.”

  My mind was made up. The way to go was the line Greg and I had worked out to the right of the big ice cliffs halfway up the Face. From there we would cut across the top of White Limbo above the ice cliffs, then follow the Great Couloir to within eight hundred metres of the top. The last major obstacle was the steep rock section which ended the Couloir. The barrier of the Yellow Band, as the cliff was known, extended right around the summit pyramid. It would be many weeks before we needed to worry about the problems it presented. Tim seemed to agree that this line was best, and Geof and Andy could be persuaded.

  We had done our best to make Camp I as comfortable as possible. The kitchen consisted of the outer shell of a two-person tent pitched on low walls of rocks. Narayan and Tenzing made the kitchen their domain, and had built the walls after we collected the rocks. There was plenty of head-room and flat stones on which to sit stoves. A few metres from the door we pitched our large dome-tent as a dining room. Over the top of both we slung a tarp which kept the weather out of both tents in all but the worst storms. A touch of luxury was our stereo system, two small speakers connected to a Walkman tape-player.

  Living at high altitude is an unavoidably uncomfortable experience. The thinner air of 5800 metres made life at Camp I noticeably harder than it had been at Advance Base. Psychological considerations, such as being relaxed and happy, became increasingly important, since negative emotions would eat away at our determination to succeed. “Psychological consideration” became the justification for the effort of carrying a music system, dozens of books, and a few frisbees and musical instruments.

  The best way to assess the conditions on our favoured route was to climb its lower slopes. The prospect of starting the technical climbing at last was exciting. The morning of our first foray up the Face we spent hours adjusting our equipment and making sure we had everything that was necessary. It had been several months since any of us had done any iceclimbing. As well, I think we all stood a little in awe of Everest’s reputation. From a practical point of view it was just another mountain, but from somewhere emanated a presence and aloofness none of us had encountered anywhere else.

  Again we baked as we trudged up to the Rongbuk nevé. Two kilometres remained up the gradual slope of the Northern Cwm. The mass of Everest loomed above us; the two ridges of the North Face stretched out to either side like the inviting arms of the Mother Goddess of the Earth. The mountain exuded timelessness and power, yet as I walked under that gigantic Face any thought of my fragile mortality was drowned in the sweat that poured from my brow.

  Luckily we found shade in the bergschrund, the big crevasse which ran the length of the Face and separated the mountain from the glacier. While we rested there we ate a little and drank as much as we could. The bergschrund created an almost insurmountable barrier, except where the gaping crevasse was filled with the snow of avalanches from above. Just to the left of where we sheltered a choke of snow provided a bridge onto the slope above the ’schrund. The adrenalin-induced alertness as I attached my crampons to my boots and unstrapped my ice-axe from my pack was a familiar and welcome feeling. Three thousand metres of mountain to be climbed and at last we were beginning.

  In the interest of speed we did not rope together. After all, if we could not climb this initial steep snow section without the aid or reassurance of a rope, what chance would we have of climbing the difficult ground higher up? After fifty metres or so of snow barely soft enough for good footprints, the snow gave way to ice—much less secure to climb upon—and I began to remember the fear and excessive caution induced by difficult unroped climbing. Here, it was not that the climbing was difficult, rather, my old crampons did not bite firmly into the ice because they were blunt from overuse. Every step felt insecure. I swore that my first job back at Camp I would be to sharpen the points of my crampons. As well, my mind had grown unaccustomed to danger because of the recent safe, sedentary months I had spent in Australia. It was the same at the start of every climb. We all faced the problem of readjusting to the dangers of a vertical environment. There is nothing like the fear of falling to induce precision in one’s movements and actions. After a day or two the precision becomes an automatic response, and the joy of climbing begins to resurface.

  As Andy reached the top of the ice section he called across, his face bright with relief, “Bit of a savage introduction, eh!”

  “Well, this is Everest, after all.”

  Above us on the steep snow slope Geof, Greg and Tim slowly climbed upwards while I paid out the rope Geof was dragging behind him. At this stage the rope did not provide any security. Our purpose was to fix a continuous line up the Face by tying the rope to anchors hammered into the slope. Here, where there was snow, the anchor was a sixty-centimetre-long alumin
ium section. Higher up where the underlying rock pushed its way to the surface we placed rock pitons. The purpose of the rope was to provide a safe and rapid way to climb and descend. When we climbed up, unbalanced by heavy loads, the security of the rope would be invaluable.

  That first afternoon we climbed about three hundred metres up the Face. Thousands of metres of climbing stretched above us up into the limits of the earth’s atmosphere. Our first sortie onto the mountain was little more than knocking on the door, yet that evening, as we skied back down the glacier to Camp I, we felt enormously satisfied. At last we were starting the technical part of the climb. The heat had exhausted us but the effects of altitude were less severe than any of our previous experiences at 6000 metres. We had acclimatised well, and that was cause for great satisfaction. Also, there was the pleasure of the climbing itself, of our bodies and minds coping with the difficulties the mountain presented.

  Determined to make the most of the good weather, Tim, Geof, Greg and Andy headed back up the mountain the next day. I felt weak from dehydration so I chose to spend the day at Camp I to recover. In the afternoon, I wandered down to our dump of gear on the glacier to collect some more rope. I made a diversion into the maze of passages between the ice towers, but travel was complicated by wide streams on the surface of the ice and blue, apparently bottomless, pools.