The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  Doug met Chris with a few brusque words—urged him to hurry on down to Camp Four, where there was room for him. Chris was too tired to react. Hamish was more sympathetic; he gave Chris something hot to drink. And then Chris carried on down, stopping to sit and rest every few steps in the gathering night, too weary to be on his feet but glad for more solitude. He took in the almost liquid orange of the ending day—the light was like a dye—and finished his walk in blackness. Ang Phurba met him at Camp Four and gave him more to drink. Chris crawled into a sleeping bag and lay shivering, lapsing in and out of sleep, undone.

  He woke tired and discouraged. The expedition had only a few days to finish climbing the mountain. The winds that blow ceaselessly just over the summit of Everest were descending upon them as a flood might rise to obliterate a city. There was no margin for error or delay. The expedition must keep Camp Five supplied so that Mick and Doug could make their daily carries to Camp Six in support of Hamish and Dougal—who must in turn make quick progress through the gully and on through to the top of the Rock Band.

  Everyone wanted to quit. Each step called for concentration and devotion to the task at hand. They were tired and miserably uncomfortable; they were befuddled by fatigue and altitude; they were homesick and afraid. They lay in their sleeping bags in the evenings and thought of what death would cost them even as their hopes of climbing the route ebbed. Four of them had left the face already. Kelvin Kent was sick. Graham Tiso was nursing his head injury. Nick Estcourt and Dave Bathgate were recovering from their ordeal in the storm. Chris remained up at Camp Four, but he was very weary.

  None of this was decisive, however. The four climbers at Camp Six—Dougal and Hamish, Doug and Mick—believed there was still a chance of getting up the route. Dougal in particular was engrossed in calculations of how to make it happen. The expedition’s original plan had been to establish a seventh camp, above the Rock Band. This now looked impossible; there wasn’t enough manpower to supply another camp, and there wasn’t time.

  Dougal, however, had an idea. He carried with him a tent sac—a lightweight shelter that a climber might use to get through a summer’s night in the Alps. He believed that one or two climbers should go for the summit from Camp Six. The summit team would carry the tent sac in case a bivouac was necessary on the descent—a near-certainty. The tent sac might give sufficient protection if there was no wind. Dougal mentioned his scheme to the others and received in return their blank looks.

  Hamish and Dougal set out for Camp Six on November 14. They would occupy the camp while Mick and Doug ferried supplies from Camp Five over the next two days. Dougal left first. He crawled from his box and stood looking across the heavens. The sun was a mere image, a painting on the sky; the cold here reduced it to a concept, thin and useless. Dougal was aware of his own strength; he was stronger than the others except for maybe Doug Scott. The view reminded him of something: he’d been here with Don Whillans. This desolate slope had continued to exist during the intervening time and would continue to exist when he was gone.

  The others followed Dougal out and up the slope. The wind rose and grew freakishly strong as they climbed. A gust picked Doug up and carried him several feet; the fixed ropes stopped him. The four climbers squinted through blowing snow at a blue sky that seemed to recede as they moved higher. They felt drawn into the pursuit of something that moved too quickly for them. They pursued it because they wished to keep it in sight; it was too interesting for them to turn away; it seemed the thing that could confirm their most precious and precarious beliefs.

  Dougal reached Camp Six, still a scattering of boxes, and dropped his load and left. They could not pitch a tent in this wind, much less climb. He moved now with his back to the wind, his mind clouded by the strangeness and beauty of his position and by the cold. He looked up into the gully—the gully he had explored it with Whillans in 1971. He remembered: They had climbed perhaps 300 feet on snow and easy rock before turning back. But the gully was bare rock this time, much harder to climb; this wind had swept the snow from it. There was no chance of getting up that; there wasn’t time.

  There remained another possibility. They could leave the face unfinished and move across to the Southeast Ridge, which led more or less easily to the summit. Dougal moved right, turning a corner and here the wind was still more terrible. He wore an oxygen mask and breathed from a cylinder; he could not otherwise have drawn breath here. The wind would blow them from the ridge.

  There was nowhere else to go. He turned and went down. He met Doug at the top of the fixed ropes, and pointed down. Doug nodded his acceptance and turned. They passed Mick a bit further down. He filmed them on their way back to Camp Five, and then he followed. Hamish was waiting for them; his oxygen set had failed; he’d turned around earlier in the day.

  The four climbers understood that they were not going back up. The expedition didn’t have the time or the manpower to lay siege to the bare rock in the gully. Dougal told Chris on the radio that night.

  Chris took the news calmly. He was relieved; they could go home. Nick Estcourt said he wished the four lead climbers had spent a night at Camp Six; he wished they’d tried harder to make further progress. He’d been back at Base Camp long enough to begin to forget the conditions high on the route, and he was angry and bereft. His work on Annapurna and now on this route, his friendship with Chris—he had earned a say in these matters.

  Chris wanted them all off the route. Dougal and the other lead climbers descended to Camp Four in the morning. Sherpas climbed up to retrieve gear that was too valuable to be left behind, but the climbers and Sherpas were all down at Camp Two by evening. They joked and chattered, well disposed toward one another now that the work was done. Dougal felt strangely calm. It struck him that failure was easy; a success always made him think of how he’d crashed the van into that boy on the road. He had wondered after the Eiger and then Annapurna what the dead boy’s family must think when they read the name Haston in the headlines. He’d been here twice and failed both times. He wanted to come here again.

  Mick Burke descended to Base Camp on the evening of November 16. He needed to get his film back to Britain. Chris and the other climbers left Camp Two at dawn of the following day to walk in morning shadows on the snows of the Western Cwm. The walkers fell silent. Camp One was empty; they pushed on down.

  Dougal and Hamish went first. Doug and Chris followed. The two of them entered the top of the Icefall together. The place had changed utterly since Chris had passed through it on his last trip up the mountain. There were huge new gaps in the glacier. Towers of ice had disappeared; new towers replaced them. The chaos seemed at once random and contrived. The place held Chris, despite its obvious dangers. He wandered about in one spot for an hour, taking pictures of some of the most grotesque features. Doug lingered with him. This place of ice shadows and monsters was very quiet. It seemed safe enough to them after the winds and cold of the Southwest Face.

  Doug and Chris carried on, and soon came across Dougal’s friend young Tony Tighe, who was making his first trip above Base Camp. He had no legal right to be on the mountain—the permit didn’t include him—but he’d contributed to the expedition, taking radio calls from high on the face, relaying messages to Chris and other decision-makers. He’d been a sort of diplomat, often restating climbers’ demands and complaints in more tactful terms. His carefulness had helped smooth relations between various expedition members. Tony had made himself useful in other ways, getting up early to see the Sherpas off in the predawn hours; they’d voted him their favorite of the British climbers. Chris was grateful to him. And so he’d invited Tony to walk up through the Icefall for a view of the Western Cwm.

  Tony was delighted; he was eager to see more of the mountain. He had accompanied twenty Sherpas up through the lower part of the Icefall that morning—they were going up to retrieve tents and other gear. He had soon fallen behind his companions. He was alone, but it didn’t matter. The track up to the Western Cwm was easy to follow,
safe enough even for an inexperienced climber; ladders and fixed ropes protected the difficult sections.

  Chris and Doug left Tony to his adventure. They arrived at Base Camp in time for lunch, and spent the afternoon cleaning up and drinking tea and chatting. They were happy. The issue was decided. They had yet to turn their minds to home and its responsibilities.

  There was a ruckus among the Sherpas. Kelvin Kent was calling to Chris; something huge had collapsed in the Icefall.

  Chris felt a buzzing in his head as he stood and crossed to the outskirts of the camp, where Kelvin and the other climbers were gathering. A Sherpa named Phurkipa arrived with a load of gear retrieved from Camp One. The collapse had occurred well above him. He didn’t know if anyone had been hurt. He’d passed Tony Tighe a few moments before the collapse, had last seen him climbing a ladder that surmounted a steep wall of ice.

  It seemed impossible that the mountain should choose Tony as its victim. He’d been stuck at Base Camp throughout the expedition, while the climbers and especially the Sherpas made scores of trips through the Icefall. He knew little of climbing’s risks. He was a civilian—an innocent. A party of Sherpas came into sight. Mick Burke shouted that one of them was Tony. Dougal in his relief put a hand on Chris’s shoulder and murmured something: I couldn’t have taken another Annapurna.

  Ian Clough was in all of their minds. Each man had rehearsed his part in this new tragedy, rummaging for feelings that might be useful or appropriate if Tony were dead. They began to put such notions aside and then someone else shouted that the climber in the orange suit was Barney Rosedale; he had stayed behind to oversee the cleanup at Camp Two.

  The new arrivals were shaken and grim. They had narrowly escaped disaster themselves. A shelf of ice had collapsed under them, leaving one of the Sherpas dangling over a 70-foot drop. The others had rescued him and had picked their careful way down and around the collapse, impressed by its magnitude. They had not seen Tony Tighe.

  Mick Burke and Dave Bathgate led four Sherpas back up into the Icefall that afternoon. They reached the region of the collapse at around eight o’clock in the evening. They stopped to listen in the moonlight that illuminated the ice blocks and towers, throwing gray shadows on the snow. They were listening for Tony’s voice, which they dreaded to hear.

  They perhaps walked upon his grave. He might be anywhere, alive or dead, in this world shaped by tremors made in turn by the warmth of the now-absent sun. They were aware of the moon and how it cast upon them the ghost of that very sun’s warmth. They did not dwell upon the fact that Tony might be buried alive but too deep for them to reach or even hear. They imagined him caught up by some inexplicable wind, swept skyward as the ice collapsed. The glacier creaked, a terrifying sound. Mick found he was trembling.

  Hamish MacInnes and Doug Scott led another group the next morning. Dougal had known Tony best; he didn’t go. The second party found nothing. Every hour that passed made the loss seem less real—more like a dream of loss. They stood and listened to water run under the ice and tried to imagine what had occurred.

  It was easy to do: Tony moving higher through the Icefall, alone amid the huge, confining shapes and shadows, the corners and walls—everything white and massive and cold, no sound or life but his own. He looked forward to the huge valley that lay above; he imagined vistas and sky and sun and the great Southwest Face itself. He would carry it forever. Meanwhile, there was this—the risk and fascination of it. Already he was learning things that had been hidden to him. He had no words for this new knowledge but he believed they might come. He eyed the ground that lay ahead and when the ice moved his fear gathered itself and left him—abandoned him as if to seek another host.

  Doug and the others kept their voices low. It was possible to believe that Tony lay trapped in some pitch-black pocket amid this jumble, cold to the bone and ashamed of his dread, grieved beyond imagination for what he had risked and now lost. Or maybe as he fell or scrambled he had time to feel only surprise that he would not see the Western Cwm.

  TONY’S DEATH, so eerily similar to Ian Clough’s death on Annapurna, had the quality of a warning or message repeated. The climbers acknowledged this message awkwardly or not at all. This new death drove them back upon themselves; their talk of it was clumsy and felt largely pointless. They tried to catalogue it as a fact; meanwhile, they carried Tony like a corpse between them, feeling the weight and looking for a decent place to set it down.

  And yet they crowded around death itself, calling to it and dodging like children into shadows when it wheeled to face them. Death impressed and interested them. They pretended to hide from it—creeping across a huge snowfield or skittering past a serac—but they understood that any death that wished to find them had only to seek. It was thrilling, the deaths horrible proof that this eyeless giant might catch them at their play.

  Chris amid his own work on the mountain had taken Tony and his efforts largely for granted. His last-minute impulse to reward Tony with permission to pass through the Icefall—such a dangerous place—had led to the young man’s death. Chris knew that his own lack of fear in the Icefall that day—he had lingered to take those photographs—was a failure of imagination; he was tired and the place was familiar.

  And anyway he wasn’t always afraid of death. A child deprived of comfort may crave intensity in other forms, even in loss. And Chris felt sometimes that his losses were leading him somewhere; they gave shape to his life and his story even more than the mountains themselves or his growing fame could do. He wished to absorb his losses into what he knew—to frame and accept them. And yet other notions at moments flickered in him—that his losses did not define him; that loss was part of something still larger that he couldn’t understand or encompass; that he stood apart from the truth; that he turned away from some version of peace—from whatever it was that he hoped welcomed each new member of the dead.

  THE OTHERS HAD their own ways of thinking about Tony’s death. Dougal felt that he’d helped to kill another person; it made him want to get drunk. Mick’s wife, Beth Burke, had helped look after cuts and bruises at Base Camp. She had liked being one of the boys, but she had watched the episode of Tony’s death with a growing sense of helplessness; these men in their confusion and desire for guidance were like marooned children. She was glad the expedition was ending. She was eager to leave the mountain.

  She walked out from the tents on the last morning and stood and stared at Everest while the others carried on with their preparations for departure. The mountain was her enemy and unlike these others she knew it. They might come back here, but she wouldn’t see it again. She stood looking at Everest and thinking that it wasn’t the mountain she feared; she feared people who didn’t know an easier way to be happy.

  The mountain was beautiful, though. She looked at it for a long time.

  11

  BONINGTON’S EXPEDITION TO Everest’s Southwest Face was widely followed at home, cementing his position as the leading British climber of his generation. He was thirty-eight years old, and his career path had at last taken shape. Other climbers recognized his organizational genius and his leadership skills. Corporate sponsors admired his ability to put on a show with the BBC and other media—even when his team failed to reach a summit. All of this made him the country’s leading candidate to lead major expeditions to Everest or other high peaks.

  His life in Bowden had begun to settle into a new pattern. Daniel was now five years old. Wendy had given birth to the couple’s third son, Rupert, three years before, in 1969. Chris saw less than he would have liked of Wendy and the boys: he now lectured all over the United Kingdom as well as on the Continent and even in the United States. He was also writing—his Annapurna book had done well, and he now set to work on a book about the attempt on the Southwest Face (virtually all of the proceeds would go to help pay the expedition’s debts). When he was home, he often climbed in the evenings with friends, including Nick Estcourt and Martin Boysen. The three of them talked about future
ventures to the high mountains.

  Those ventures would be informed in part by Bonington’s growing awareness of new climbing trends that undercut his recent achievements. His Annapurna and Everest expeditions had demonstrated that climbers could tackle difficult rock and ice climbing at very high altitudes—but both expeditions had relied upon the old approach, with huge teams of porters, a series of established camps and thousands of feet of fixed rope. Meanwhile, a few bold climbers were venturing into the highest ranges in smaller parties—in effect tackling Himalayan peaks as they would engage the much smaller mountains of the Alps.

  These climbers aimed to move quickly up a route, traveling light and carrying a single tent or other shelter—eliminating the need to establish and stock a series of camps. This in turn meant there was no need to lay fixed rope for climbers and porters to move up and down as they ferried gear between camps. The new alpinestyle ascents were also relatively inexpensive, an important point. Corporate and other funding for expeditions was mostly limited to assaults on the most famous peaks—in particular, Everest.

  Some older climbers disapproved of the trend toward alpinestyle ascents of very big routes. The authorities that granted permission to climb in countries such as India and Pakistan and Nepal also were skeptical. Fewer climbers and porters meant less support in the event of an accident. The lack of fixed ropes and established camps on the mountain could make an emergency retreat difficult or impossible.

  Chris knew all of this—but he also knew the risks posed by traditional siege-style expeditions. Climbers moving up and down the route between camps were on the peak for much longer, exposed to the hazards of rockfall, avalanche, weather and accident. There was much to be said for getting a small team up and back down in a matter of days rather than months, putting fewer lives at risk for shorter periods. Apart from such considerations, the Everest trip had left him physically and emotionally drained. He wanted a break from the organizational and other responsibilities of leading a major expedition. And there was another point. He wasn’t ready to fade into climbing history. He wanted to stay a climber, a mountaineer engaged with mountains.