by Clint Willis
MORE PRAISE FOR
THE BOYS OF EVEREST
Finalist, Banff Mountain Literature Award, 2006
The Boys of Everest celebrates that crazy bunch they called Bonington’s Boys and tells their story in compelling detail.
– Scottish Sunday Mail
The Boys of Everest is as exquisite as it is exciting. It belongs on that rarified shelf where only the most accomplished and ambitious writers’ work can survive. Clint Willis will rank with the likes of Peter Matthiessen (The Snow Leopard), Heinrich Harrer (Seven Years in Tibet) and Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air).
– Peter Kadzis, Editor, The Boston Phoenix
The book is genuinely exciting as Mr Willis dramatically recounts the competition of egos and the close calls on treacherous Himalayan peaks, and grows increasingly sombre as the toll grows. The story of the band of climbers known as Bonington’s Boys is a good and worthy one. Mr Willis tells a story that is gripping and poignant and even appalling. Just like the mountains themselves.
– The Wall Street Journal
Clint Willis’ lively writing and his reporting élan lend The Boys of Everest a gripping, you-are-there quality. Your limbs ache, your toes freeze, you feel the burn of the icy wind. A wonderful read.
– Mike Sager, Contributing Editor, US Esquire
This book, with its vivid evocation of high-altitude derring-do, is so breathtaking you may need to read it with supplemental oxygen.
– Michael Finkel, author of True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa
Fascinating. Willis’ meticulous, pitch-by-pitch accounts of climbs on the savage Eiger, the killer Annapurna, the intensely difficult Northeast Ridge of Everest and other major routes will make gripping reading…the detailed narrative brings out the strength and courage of men pushed to their limits. It’s enough to make non-climbers ask again the age-old question: why do men climb mountains?
– The Washington Post
What could arguably have proven the most contentious parts of the book have, in my opinion, proven to be its greatest strength, that of moving into the realms of ‘story’. I would hesitate to call this fiction because, although fulfilling all the requirements of that genre, the passages I refer to go further than that description alone would suggest. The passages concerned are narrated by an omniscient presence travelling with some of these climbers shortly before their deaths and deal with emotions and feelings that only the climber himself could have known about. So yes, in one sense they are fictions but I would argue that it is in these passages that Willis sets himself apart from other more prosaic authors and thus ensures both a wide readership and a lasting place in the literature of climbing. I receive many review books. Rarely do I read them cover-to-cover the day I receive them. This is one such book.
– Charlie Orr, Editor, The Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal
I think the great accomplishment of Willis’ book is that he manages to write about the interiority of the climbers’ feelings and fears without collapsing into trite platitudes. There is something about Willis’ narrative as he traces the arc of the climbers’ lives that makes their continual return to the mountains fascinating – and the loss of many of their lives truly tragic.
– Chris Mitchell, Editor, spikemagazine.com
A gripping adventure saga…of life spent teetering on the edge of the abyss.
– Publisher’s Weekly
What is an American editor of ripping-yarn anthologies doing retelling the heroic story of our boys as a tragedy revolving around Bonington? Actually, Clint Willis has done surprisingly well, partly because he has a perceptive sense of character and partly because he has listened carefully to the survivors. Willis is a gripping story-teller. All of his writing skills are brought to bear on the evidence he has sifted, which he treats with respect and sincerity, and the result is a highly readable imaginative exploration of events. Read the three-decade rollercoaster ride of this bold, gripping and thought-provoking book.
– Terry Gifford, author and climber
The Boys of Everest takes us deep inside the hearts and minds of men at once quixotic and genuinely noble. Willis has an extraordinary gift for conveying states of mind in extremis, particularly those moments for a climber when all the comfortable assumptions about himself fall away. The reader feels a powerful shock of recognition, whether or not he or she has ever been anywhere near a mountain.
– John Manderino, author of Reasons for Leaving and The Man Who Once Played Catch with Nellie Fox
The Boys of Everest is a captivating story and read. It’s very, very good.
– Ed Webster, author of Snow in the Kingdom: My Storm Years on Everest
For Jennifer and Harper and Abner
The Boys
of Everest
Chris Bonington and the
Tragedy of Climbing’s
Greatest Generation
CLINT WILLIS
CONTENTS
Selected Characters in Order of Appearance
Selected Climbs and Expeditions
Author’s Note
Introduction
PART ONE : Boys
PART TWO : Men
PART THREE : Legends
PART FOUR : Ghosts
Epilogue
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
SELECTED CHARACTERS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
Chris Bonington
Hamish MacInnes
Don Whillans
Ian Clough
John Harlin
Dougal Haston
Mick Burke
Nick Estcourt
Martin Boysen
Doug Scott
Peter Boardman
Joe Tasker
Dick Renshaw
Al Rouse
SELECTED CLIMBS AND EXPEDITIONS
1958
Petit Dru, Bonatti Pillar (French Alps)
1960
Annapurna II, West Ridge (Nepal)
1961
Nuptse, South Face (Nepal)
Mont Blanc, Central Pillar of Freney (French Alps)
1962
Grandes Jorasses, Walker Spur (French Alps)
Eiger, North Face (Swiss Alps)
1963
Central Tower of Paine, West Face (Patagonia)
1966
Eiger, North Face Direct (Swiss Alps)
1970
Annapurna, South Face (Nepal)
1972
Everest, Southwest Face (Nepal)
1974
Changabang, East Ridge (India)
1975
Everest, Southwest Face (Nepal)
Dunagiri, South Ridge (India)
1976
Changabang, West Wall (India)
The Ogre, West Ridge (Pakistan)
1978
K2, West Ridge (Pakistan)
1979
Kangchenjunga, North Ridge (Nepal)
Gauri Sankar, West Ridge (Nepal)
1980
K2, West Ridge and Abruzzi Spur (Pakistan)
Kongur, reconnaissance expedition (China)
1981
Kongur, West Ridge (China)
1982
Everest, Northeast Ridge (Tibet)
1985
Everest, Southeast Ridge (Nepal)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
VIRGINIA WOOLF SAID that we read to “leave behind the tether of a single mind . . . and deviate into the minds and bodies of others.” We also read (and write) to examine the stories other people tell about themselves and each other, and to repair or rethink those stories as well as our own.
Those motives informed my methods in reporting and writing this book. I conducted extensive interviews and corresp
ondence with climbers and their friends and families. I made close and repeated readings of scores of primary and secondary sources, including articles, biographies, diaries, expedition books, letters, memoirs, poems and other published or unpublished work. I also drew upon all of those sources as well as my own experience to imagine what climbers might have thought or felt at certain moments. It occurs to me that in doing so I have taken in public the sort of liberty that readers and writers ordinarily take in the privacy of our imaginations.
INTRODUCTION
THE SUMMIT OF Everest surprised them. Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary had been climbing for five hours; the last hour or so they had lost themselves in toiling up the undulating ridge of snow that ended here, at 29,028 feet. They looked up and saw the view and understood.
The Sherpa and the young man from New Zealand looked at one another, smiling behind their black oxygen masks. They shook hands and then embraced, clumsy in their heavy boots and layers of clothing. They were awkward in their mutual shyness—partners in an arranged marriage, aware of their differences now that they had this in common.
They didn’t stay long. They knew what lay ahead—the descent to the others, the journey back to their respective civilizations—and they thought of this with a mixture of exhilaration and curiosity and fear and the beginnings of grief.
Sherpa Tenzing buried some food as a gift to the mountain’s gods. Edmund Hillary buried with the food a small crucifix. He was conscious that he had been singled out in some astonishing way—that he was a mere instrument in some enormous work, some new wonder of the world. After thirty-two years and sixteen expeditions—and at the cost of twenty-two lives—men had finally reached the summit of the world’s highest peak.
Hillary and Tenzing left the summit just before noon—still the morning of May 29, 1953. The news appeared in the London Times four days later, Coronation Day for the young Queen Elizabeth. The history of mountaineering was over.
What next?
A SMALL, CLOSE-KNIT band of roughly a dozen climbers spent the next three decades answering that question. They emerged from the villages, slums and middle-class suburbs of postwar Great Britain. Together, they formed the core of climbing’s greatest generation. Their leader was the boyish but driven Chris Bonington. His chief lieutenants and collaborators included such legends in the making as Mick Burke, Nick Estcourt, Dougal Haston, Doug Scott and Don Whillans. The group, which came to be known as Bonington’s Boys, took on handpicked reinforcements from the ranks of emerging prodigies. Their recruits included young superstars such as Dick Renshaw and Al Rouse as well as the two young men who by the end threatened to outshine them all: ex-seminarian Joe Tasker and his immensely strong partner and rival Peter Boardman.
Bonington and his companions began their adventures during the 1950s, setting new rock- and ice-climbing standards on crags and mountains in England, Scotland and Wales. Deprived of a shot at mountaineering’s Great Problem—the first ascent of Everest—they took on the most difficult routes in the Alps, first copying and then surpassing the Continent’s most advanced alpinists. The group eventually turned their attention to the Himalayan ranges, where they attempted a series of incredibly dangerous and difficult routes on the world’s biggest mountains. Bonington and his comrades during the ’70s and early ’80s made legendary expeditions to more than a dozen high peaks, including Annapurna, K2 and—above all—Everest itself. The world’s highest mountain became the scene of their most glorious achievements as well as their most bitter defeats. Their story in a sense begins on Everest, and it ends there.
The previous generation had taken more than thirty years to climb Everest in part because they were unwilling to take certain chances. Most of them would turn back from a summit attempt rather than risk a night out on the mountain’s slopes. A few British climbers—George Mallory was one—took such risks, but their peers judged them daredevils, irresponsible and unsporting.
The climbers in Bonington’s circle had a decided tendency to press on—to cross the avalanche-prone snow slope, to climb higher as daylight waned or a storm blew in. They took extreme risks; when their luck held, they pushed it still further. Their acceptance of such risks created new possibilities. It encouraged them to attempt more difficult routes on bigger mountains, most famously Annapurna’s towering South Face and Everest’s Southwest Face. Their targets grew more spectacular even as the teams grew smaller and their hierarchies grew more vague—so that by the end, each new expedition amounted to a small group of close friends moving fast and light up some enormous unclimbed mountain ridge or face.
Bonington and his comrades made climbing a mountain a more spontaneous and a more creative act—less a mission—than it had been. They paid a heavy price. Only a few men survived the great climbs the group undertook in the 1970s and ’80s.
The dead left behind careers, friends, parents, wives and children. The survivors went on climbing. It’s possible to generalize—to say that Bonington and his comrades climbed for thrills or for friendship or because they were ambitious or self-destructive or to prove their worth or courage—but the climbers’ motives are buried in their story.
—CLINT WILLIS
Those who travel to mountaintops
are half in love with themselves,
and half in love with oblivion.
—ROBERT MACFARLANE,
Mountains of the Mind (2003)
PART ONE
Boys
They were young and did not
leave much behind them and need
someone to remember them.
—NORMAN MACLEAN,
Young Men and Fire (1992)
The Eiger, North Face.
CHRIS BONINGTON, CHRIS BONINGTON PICTURE LIBRARY
1
THE CLIMBERS WENT to bed early and rose in the dark to stuff ropes and pitons, stove and sleeping bags, tea and scraps of food into their tattered rucksacks. They struggled into boots and crampons and emerged from the relative warmth of the alpine hut to cross the glacier under a sky pocked with stars. The mountains looked to young Chris Bonington like black velvet cutouts against the starlit sky.
Chris and his companion, Hamish MacInnes, shivered as they walked with their burdens. They were silent for the most part. They saw the route—the Southeast Spur of the Pointe de Lépiney, a series of overhangs; it looked impossible to Chris.
He reminded himself that he was becoming a seasoned alpinist; at twenty-three, he’d been climbing for seven years. This season, the summer of 1958, was his second in the French Alps. He was a superb natural climber, and he was ambitious. He didn’t look it, though; he looked young, even soft. He was a gangly, brown-haired boy. He had a long face with high cheekbones, full lips and smallish blue eyes. He had a baby’s complexion. He was a graduate of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst; he commanded a British tank troop stationed in Germany—still, those overhangs looked hideous.
Hamish was older; he was twenty-seven, just back from his second Himalayan expedition. He didn’t seem worried about the overhangs—but then that was the problem with Hamish: he never worried about anything. He was a lean-faced fellow with hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes, an eccentric who insisted on eating brown bread and who slept on the floor for his health. He had an interest in mountain rescue, but he was himself horribly accident-prone. He’d fractured his skull falling from a climb the previous summer; that same evening he’d gotten drunk and tried to climb a church; he’d fallen again, breaking a leg.
The two climbers roped up and moved across the easy terrain at the bottom of their route. There was something spectacular about these first moments of a day in the mountains. You began walking with a sour stomach, your body cold and stiff. Soon you would start to sweat and wake up. The difficulties lay well ahead and now you were keenly alert to the beauty of this place, of your surroundings; you pitied the people who slept in the valley. Chris was afraid of what might happen, and yet pleased with how things had turned out—he felt as though his story had
come to its happy conclusion. And all the while he knew that the range of the day’s possible outcomes included his own death, a death that he understood vaguely as a merging with the inky shapes of mountains, discernable in this earliest morning only because their forms blotted out the stars.
They entered a gully next to the face; it let them bypass the worst overhangs. Chris thought they should simply follow the gully to the summit. Hamish brushed this notion aside and led back out onto smooth rock slabs, which required slow and painstaking work.
They climbed until it was nearly dark and spent the night on a ledge under an overhang. Chris tucked himself into a nook in the rock. He had brought a sleeping bag and he wrapped it in plastic sheeting, but he was too cold to sleep.
He was eager to move in the morning, and he led the first pitch. He tied one end of the rope to his waist and began to climb. As he moved higher, he looked for cracks in the rock or other spots where he could place protection, mostly metal pitons or wooden wedges. He hung a sling from each new piece of gear, and clipped a carabiner—a gated metal oval—to the sling; that done, he clipped his trailing rope to the carabiner.