The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  Chris had this in mind when he made his next decision. The decision would define the careers and reputations of every climber on the expedition. Nick Estcourt and Martin Boysen were scheduled to go out front when Mick and Tom finished their work on the Rock Band. But Chris believed that Nick and Martin had worn themselves out carrying loads between camps. He wondered, too, if they were equal to the route finding that might be required high on the face. Meanwhile, Don and Dougal had finished a two-day rest at Base Camp; they were already moving back up the mountain.

  Chris, taking up his mantle of official expedition leader, resolved to send Don and Dougal back into the lead, leapfrogging them past Nick and Martin. He knew those two would be upset, and he put off announcing his decision until Don and Dougal had made their way back up the route to the higher camps.

  Mick and Tom meanwhile made further progress. Mick led yet again on May 12, climbing more difficult rock with very little protection. He climbed deliberately, a man who understood his job and its risks. He occasionally reached down to wipe snow from rock or to chip away patches of ice. He was entirely absorbed and the climbing drew him on into difficulties that weren’t obvious until they were upon him. He led Tom up two frightening pitches to the foot of a gully that seemed to lead to a traverse, which Mick thought would bring them at last to the Flatiron. They retreated to Camp Five in a rising snowstorm.

  They didn’t climb at all the next day. Tom cleared huge drifts of snow from the campsite. Mick descended to meet Martin Boysen and Mike Thompson; they had come up with supplies for the high camp. Martin was still going surprisingly well. Mike was in desperate shape, very tired and still suffering from his ulcerated mouth. Mick took his load and sent him down and turned to hump his way back up the ropes to Camp Five.

  THE CLIMBERS SCATTERED up and down the route had until now operated in a quasidemocratic mode. They had settled their differences as a kind of fractious family. This now changed—in part because more of them had begun to glimpse what was at stake.

  They had all seen the television camera crew that haunted Base Camp (the crew had stayed off the glacier since a cameraman’s run-in with a crevasse). The climbers knew that this expedition was in some ways a public undertaking, that it had the potential to make or cement or enhance reputations. At the same time, each man carried his desire to shrug off his greed for success or reputation. The climbers’ competing wishes—for success and for virtue—led them on and helped account for what happened to them.

  Chris knew that a success on Annapurna would give a major boost to his mountaineering career. It might also allow him to strengthen the narrative that was taking shape in his mind, the story he wished to inhabit. Don needed a success because he had failed too often, and because he needed reputation and the money that he assumed would follow. Dougal wanted admiration and forgiveness and also the oblivion of kicking steps in snow.

  The others—Nick Estcourt and Martin Boysen, Mick Burke and Ian Clough and the American, Tom Frost—had their own ambitions. They wanted to behave well. They had done carries and some climbing, and each had imagined finding himself on the summit.

  Don and Dougal reached Camp Four on May 13. Chris during that evening’s radio call announced his plan to send them immediately into the lead, ahead of Nick and Martin. Nick objected; so did Mick Burke. They argued that Don and Dougal, fresh from Base, were needed to carry loads to Camp Five, which was very low on supplies. Don broke in to say that he and Dougal were needed up front; in his view, the other climbers had done a poor job of pushing out the route. His accusation infuriated both Nick and Mick.

  The conversation veered into acrimony. Chris eventually shut it down, dictating a compromise. Don and Dougal would carry loads for one more day; that done, however, they would take over the climbing above Camp Five.

  Mick and Tom, both of them stung by Don’s criticism, covered 800 feet of new ground the next day. They descended the mountain on May 15. They had done the hardest climbing on the face during their five days in the lead. Mick in particular had delivered a spectacular performance. He felt a sense of release and fulfillment; the feeling came in waves as he followed the fixed ropes down. He passed other climbers struggling to haul loads up the face. They looked weary—downhearted and confused. He saw himself in them: they were children, ignorant optimists who had promised to make a stream run uphill—but children would have played at their task for a time and then wandered off.

  Chris was making his own way up the mountain from Base Camp, where he had gone to recover from a bout of chest pains. He reached Camp Three on May 17. Don and Dougal meanwhile joined Martin to carry loads up to Camp Five, where the three of them spent the night. The next day they followed the fixed ropes to Mick and Tom’s high point. Martin turned back—his feet were very cold. Don and Dougal dropped their loads at the top of the Flatiron and carried on, fixing rope up a gully that Dougal thought might take them out of the Rock Band at last. They climbed another 400 feet before turning back to follow Martin back down to Camp Five, where Nick Estcourt had arrived with another load of supplies.

  The night was hellish. Nick and Martin were nearly suffocated when a snow slide collapsed their tent. The snow also covered the Whillans Box, and all of the climbers’ supplies. Don and Martin spent the next day digging out and relocating the shelters. Dougal and Nick descended to Camp Four to pick up more food and gear. The day was very cold and windy, but Dougal felt a mounting happiness. He was moving well; the conditions that had begun to overwhelm the other climbers had spared him.

  Martin also had held up better than most of the other climbers—repeatedly making the long carry between Camp Four and Camp Five—but now he had reached the end of his tether. He left for Base Camp that day, knowing that he wouldn’t be this high on the South Face again. Nick was suffering, too; coping with the avalanche the previous night had taken much of his fading strength.

  Don and Dougal climbed the fixed ropes the following day to reach Mick and Tom’s high point again. This time, they traversed across into a snow bank and began digging a platform for Camp Six. Nick followed with supplies, but couldn’t finish the carry; he left his load in the snow beneath them. Dougal went down a few rope lengths to retrieve Nick’s abandoned load and stopped. He took off his own pack for a moment. His foot brushed it. The pack moved, and before he could react it was sliding and bouncing down the face. It took with it his personal gear and the food for the new camp.

  A wave of self-pity welled up in him. He imagined Don going for the summit without him. He smothered the image, and turned away from the mountain in a half-amused rage, oddly pleased by this new turn. He knew what he must do and the fact that he had the strength to do it—when none of the others would have—made him happy. He would descend and scrounge a sleeping bag from one of the lower camps; that done, he would simply climb back up with it. He was in this moment the person he had wished to be, a kind of superman after all.

  It took him a mere twenty minutes to descend to Camp Five. Chris had come up the ropes to the camp with more supplies, and he offered his own sleeping bag to Dougal. That would leave Chris without a bag, but he could radio down for someone to carry up a replacement the next day. Dougal meanwhile could rejoin Don at Camp Six.

  Dougal agreed; he would leave the next morning—which meant he was stuck here with Nick and Chris for the night, with two sleeping bags between three men. Dougal put on all the down clothing he could scrounge and woke shivering every few hours to lay awake cursing his own clumsiness. He rose early the next morning and set off with Bonington’s sleeping bag and some porridge—Don was living on cigars and melted snow up at Camp Six.

  Dougal reached the camp in the early afternoon. The two men ate some of the porridge, and then they climbed two more rope-lengths up the gully they hoped would at last lead them out of the Rock Band. They returned to camp amid whirling snow and heavy gusts of wind. Chris arrived with more rope and a radio, and immediately turned around to head back down to Camp Five. Dougal, watching
him leave, thought Chris seemed exhausted.

  The tent here at Camp Six hung over the edge of its narrow platform. The site was tremendously exposed, with awe-inspiring drops on three sides and very little shelter from the wind. The tent shook and billowed. Dougal imagined it setting sail across the Himalayan sky with himself and Don in its belly, some hideous runaway kite. Don kept his boots on and advised his partner to do the same; they might need to make a quick exit. Still, they were content. They were where they had meant to be from the beginning—in position to try to finish climbing the face.

  THEY SURVIVED THE night and set out in the morning in continued high winds and snow. It was a relief to be out in the weather after a night of damp cowering behind the tent’s fabric walls. The cold seemed like a breath of heaven; it uplifted and protected them. They weren’t afraid at all.

  Each man climbed almost as if alone. Dougal strained to look across through blowing snow to where his companion stood or moved; at times he only felt Don’s presence. It was possible in these conditions to acknowledge that the two of them were bound to one another by a mutual love of this solitude and the freedom it conferred upon them—by a love of the distance it put between them and their mistakes, their confusion. They reached their gully amid the continuing storm. Dougal led up through small avalanches, favoring one side of the gully to avoid being swept off his feet by the shin-deep torrents of snow. He found bare rock and placed a piton for an anchor, and at that moment a tide of snow pummeled and drenched him. He waited for it to stop, but the heavy white stuff continued to billow and press at him; there seemed no limit to the snow on this mountain. The climbers gave up and turned to make their half-blind way back to Camp Six, where they crawled inside their tent and listened to the wind shriek.

  The sound died after a few hours and the climbers emerged to mottled sunlight. They were not tired, and they climbed back to their high point in the gully, reaching it early in the afternoon to swim upward once more through the heavy new snow. Don had brought an entrenching tool, and they used it to dig a path of sorts to the start of a chimney.

  They were weary when they descended once again to their lonely camp. They were short of food and pitons. No one in the lower camps had ventured out to make a carry. The two climbers again felt their solitude. It seemed to them that the expedition was winding down; that they were left to climb the mountain themselves. The idea pleased and disoriented them; some tether had snapped. And they were very curious. They didn’t know where their new gully was taking them. It might be a dead end or it might be the finish of the route’s difficulties. They were afire to know.

  They set out very early the next morning. This time it was astonishingly cold. The cold drove their wits from them. They were down to awareness, and after a time even that seemed to vanish so that the climber’s identities blurred into the mountain or the cold itself. Dougal’s experience near the finish of the Eiger Direct had been something like this—an almost hellish striving that he loved and that emptied him of memory and regret, made him useful and appropriate. He recognized this as an echo of the truth of things. He was stepping at dawn onto an empty stage where he could perform without witness.

  They worked their way into the gully again. Don found a place to take off his boots and warm his feet; he was very concerned about frostbite. Dougal led up into the chimney they had reached the day before. The rock was slick with snow, offering poor holds and little protection. They were down to four pitons. They were now very high—over 24,000 feet—so that every move made it hard for Dougal to breathe. A part of his mind held a picture of something from school: a syringe taking fluid from a beaker. He made his way at last out of the chimney and once more into snow; there was still more of the gully to climb.

  They had fixed almost all of their remaining rope, but they wanted to know what came next—in particular, whether they were at last approaching the end of the Rock Band. They untied from their last anchor and continued to climb, roped together but with no anchor to stop a fall. They had been on more dangerous ground many times but here the possibility of dying together was vivid to them; it awoke in them a sense that their living together—what was happening now—was no less profound. The intimacy of this moved them both. They held their understanding of the risk at a barely sufficient distance, aiming to diminish it toward its ordinary status as a kind of myth without losing the intimacy or the thrill of it; it was very thrilling. Tears rose in Don’s eyes, not only because of his love for the younger man—what he suddenly recognized as his hopes for Dougal—but also because this view of his own vulnerability came as a relief. He was for the moment free of any notion that he could not die.

  They moved in a dream of a narrative; the world had dwindled to a setting for a children’s story. The gully led them to a view of a snowfield and of Annapurna’s summit—it looked in reach. They could establish Camp Seven here, at the top of the gully; they believed this would put them within a day’s climb of the summit. Death shrank to a mere enemy as they retreated in the snow; death was once again something that lay between them and some future—no longer with them, no longer part of each moment.

  DON AND DOUGAL descended to the tent at Camp Six and crawled into their sleeping bags. Chris arrived from Camp Five with more rope. They needed a tent for Camp Seven, and he offered to go down to retrieve one the next day. Don and Dougal would take a rest day; there was no point in going back up without the tent. Dougal urged Chris to bring up a sleeping bag and personal gear along with the tent so that the three of them could go to the summit together.

  Chris set out down the fixed ropes late in the day, promising to be back with the tent and his things the following morning. He spent the night alone at Camp Five, and in the morning rose and packed carefully: tent, movie camera, food, his own gear and sleeping bag and oxygen cylinder. The load came to more than sixty pounds—it was too much to carry. He would have to leave his own gear and his sleeping bag behind. Dougal and Don would go to the summit without him. He gave in to his fatigue and disappointment, slumping in the snow and sobbing—then stopped as suddenly, cursing himself for his weakness. His head cleared and he set out with his smaller load, struggling up the fixed ropes to Camp Six.

  He delivered his load to Dougal and Don, and returned to Camp Five, where he came upon Ian Clough. Ian with his characteristic unselfishness had forced his way up through the snow with oxygen masks and food for the summit team. The two friends settled in for the night and Chris reviewed the situation. Dougal and Don were in position to establish Camp Seven the following day—April 24—and then try for the summit. Ian and Chris would meanwhile carry loads to Camp Six. They would move up to Camp Seven on April 25, and would make their own summit attempt the next day. Mick and Tom were at Camp Four now; they could be in position to make their summit bid on April 27.

  It looked good on paper—but the next morning’s weather was bad, with clouds and high wind. Chris had now spent three days carrying loads to Camp Six at 24,000 feet. Those carries had been difficult, but this fourth day was nightmarish. He had several attacks of diarrhea while he was packing at Camp Five. Each attack meant dropping his wind pants and other layers to expose his bottom to the stinging cold; cleaning up each time was another ordeal. He had another attack on the fixed ropes later in the day; this time, he had to remove his waist harness and dangle from a makeshift chest harness—amid this struggle, a powder snow avalanche filled his pants and ran up his back. Ian had his own problems; his oxygen bottle didn’t work properly. He discarded it, and was soon very cold. He reached Camp Six half an hour behind Chris.

  The wind was bad all day. Ian thought back to his time with Chris in the Alps eight years before—their blissful day on the Walker Spur in 1962, just before they’d climbed the Eiger together. This place was darker; you could never manage to forget that it was dangerous. You had to think of your fear as a hiding place and refuse to go there; you had to force yourself to stay out in the open or you would be miserable every moment. It occurred to
Ian that climbing protected him from being ordinary even as it threatened to take away everything—love and work, the joy that sometimes came to him at night so that he lay awake thinking of his sleeping wife and child. He brought them to mind briefly now. He did it like someone drinking whisky in the daytime—a quick swallow and put it away.

  DON AND DOUGAL followed the ropes back up to the site for Camp Seven, carrying the tent that Chris had brought them. It was very foggy; they climbed in a near-whiteout. It was windy, too, and cold again. Don stopped twice to take off his boots and warm his feet. They reached the top of the ropes and Dougal peered up through the murk toward the top of the gully. He could make out the stretch they had climbed unprotected two days earlier. It was more frightening in these conditions. He stared through the crust of ice that had formed on his goggles and set out; this time Don gave him a belay.

  Dougal was reminded once more of summit day on the Eiger Direct; only this was worse. There was no protection at all, and no sense of anyone through this white wind. He thought once of falling—he had run out almost 300 feet of rope—and the thought was like an escape; he felt the pull of speed, of departure. Abruptly he came upon the new campsite, desolate and alluring at once. The sight of it made him smile; he didn’t know why.

  Don followed. He took a long time and rose from the gloom like some Yeti; the sight of him startled Dougal. The two of them staggered about in the wind, looking for a flat spot to pitch the tent in this world of white. Don began digging in the snow but he soon struck hard ice. There was nowhere to dig a decent platform. Dougal took dazed notice of the absence of his own left hand. It had gone completely numb. They had run out of time; they would have to return to Camp Six for the night.