by Clint Willis
His interest in the Southwest Face had become a fascination, which bloomed now into an obsession, one that distracted him from the more ordinary tasks of his life as a husband and father. Those family duties sustained him at moments, but they interfered with his compulsion to solve the problem, to manage difficulties that taxed his growing powers, at times consuming him entirely. He had discovered in himself tremendous appetites, including an appetite for the stupendously taxing and complex work of inventing this expedition, and now he indulged his need fully, telling himself that the work of creating a successful expedition to the Southwest Face would reinvent him, that he would return to his other life a new man and a better one.
This time he went at the problem with certain advantages. He had a year to plan the expedition—he had thrown together his first Everest expedition in a few months. What was more, he now knew the route firsthand. He had come to believe that the best way past the Rock Band lay up a snow gully just to the left of the route through the lower camps on the face. The earliest expeditions to the face had considered this gully, but recent attempts—including his own expedition—had focused their efforts on a gully that led to the far right of the face, near the Southeast Ridge. The right-hand gully had proven impossible in 1972, when Dougal Haston had gazed up into it to discover rock blown clean of snow. Worse, that gully appeared to lead to further hard climbing. Chris had concluded that the gully that lay to the left offered a more promising alternative.
He had learned from his experience with the weather. He figured the expedition should make an earlier start to avoid the winds that had wrecked their chances in 1972. This would expose the team to more avalanche risk, but the gamble seemed worthwhile—necessary. He would bring stronger shelters, as well. The wind had destroyed most of the climbers had established on the face during the first expedition.
Veterans of the 1972 expedition would provide the core of his climbing team, but he would bring a larger group this time—more climbers and more porters. That meant he needed more money, at a time when Great Britain’s economic problems—the country was mired in a recession—would make it difficult to find sponsors.
Chris carried these plans and concerns back to England, where he joined Wendy and the children in their trailer at Badger Hill; the builders were still engaged in renovating the cottage. His literary agent George Greenfield set to work to find a sponsor who could put up 100,000 pounds to finance the new Everest venture—and succeeded almost immediately. Barclay’s Bank agreed to put up the cash. The deal provoked a minor controversy in the press and several speeches in Parliament to the effect that such a sum could be better invested in the slumping British economy.
Chris began assembling his team. Dougal Haston and Doug Scott were already committed. Martin Boysen had been on Annapurna as well as Changabang. He had skipped the first Everest expedition—his wife had been pregnant—but he would come along this time. Nick Estcourt’s job had kept him from Changabang, but he would return to Everest. Hamish MacInnes, now forty-four, would come as deputy leader. Hamish would be making his third expedition to the face. His experience had left him doubtful of the chances for success, but he wanted to come.
Mick Burke was skeptical, too, but he was coming. He would be miserable if the team got up the route without him. Mick had come a long way from his days of bartending and odd jobs in the Lake District. He now worked full-time for the BBC, and he and Beth had a daughter, Sara. Mick doted on the child. He had always liked children; he was quite friendly with the Boningtons’ young sons, Daniel and Rupert. He would get down on the floor to play with the kids during his visits to the Bonington home, where expedition meetings often served as excuses for somewhat boozy reunions among the climbers and their families.
Chris offered Mick two options: He could go along as a full-time cameraman—or he could join the climbing team and do his filming on the side. Mick chose the second option. He would climb the route with the rest of them and tote a camera, much as he had done on Annapurna and on the first Everest trip.
Graham Tiso and Dave Bathgate, both members of the 1972 team, turned down Bonington’s invitation this time; so did Barney Rosedale and Kelvin Kent. Chris invited Charlie Clarke to replace Rosedale as the expedition doctor. Clarke, thirty-one, the son of an eminent physician, was himself a successful neurologist, an earnest and engaging young man. He had made six expeditions to the Himalaya, always with small parties. He climbed at a reasonable standard but wasn’t madly ambitious as a climber—he simply loved the high mountains. Chris liked Charlie enormously, recognized and valued the younger man’s intelligence and maturity. Chris also was impressed by Charlie’s background and the steady confidence the younger man seemed to draw from it. Charlie seemed in some ways a younger, in some ways more blessed and perhaps less driven version of Bonington himself. Charlie seemed reliable, a person who would behave well in a crisis.
Chris recruited Dave Clarke—an occasional climbing partner, a steady sort and the owner of a Leeds climbing shop—to manage the equipment for the expedition. Chris also invited his old army friend Mike Thompson, a low-key eccentric with a quick wit. Mike had served nobly as a support climber on Annapurna. He agreed to organize the food for Everest. Mike Cheney—he worked for Jimmy Roberts’s trekking business in Nepal—would take charge of Base Camp.
Chris needed more climbers. He invited Allen Fyffe, a first-rate ice climber, on the advice of Graham Tiso. Barclays Bank wanted a representative on the climb, and the bank proposed Mike Rhodes, an affable and energetic young man—he was twenty-seven—who supported a wife and three young children on his job at the bank. Doug Scott proposed Paul Braithwaite (known to all as Tut), an art school dropout who made his living as a freelance decorator. Tut was tall and absurdly slim, with long hair and a droopy moustache. Chris thought he looked too skinny to be much of a force on the mountain, but Tut’s record in the Alps as well as Alaska and the Pamirs was reassuring.
Tut suggested one more climber: Peter Boardman, twenty-four, an outdoors instructor who had made impressive alpine-style climbs on difficult peaks in the Hindu Kush. Peter climbed rock as well as almost anyone in England—only Martin Boysen and perhaps one or two others could match him.
Chris invited Boardman to come down to the Lake District for a climb. Peter was a good-looking boy, six feet tall with a mop of black hair that set off his strong but regular features. His eyes were very dark, and carried an air of intelligence—of curiosity tempered by shyness—which Chris found immediately appealing. The young man seemed modest and thoughtful; he was well-spoken, courteous and even respectful without overdoing it. He seemed almost gentle—he was careful of other people—but none of this could conceal an ambitious, competitive and deeply confident streak that Chris recognized and approved.
The confidence came partly from Peter’s awareness of his various gifts, which included his abilities on rock. He had a strong upper body, with a long torso and long arms. He started up a route and it was clear that he was made differently in some way. It was strangely soothing to see him move higher; there seemed not much effort in it.
Chris asked Peter to come along to Everest. There was little question of refusing such an invitation. Peter understood—as did Chris—that this was the sort of gift or blessing other types of men had issued or not issued to climbers a generation before. The old Oxbridge elite had passed into history some time during the past decade. Chris Bonington and his boys had replaced them.
The relics of the old elite were still in evidence. The 1975 Southwest Face expedition sported a Committee of Management chaired by Lord Hunt—the man who had organized and led the 1953 expedition that put Hillary and Tenzing on the summit of Everest. The committee members were mostly adventurers from an earlier day. They weren’t entirely sure what to make of Chris and his friends, including the climbing team’s single representative: long-haired, blunt-spoken Doug Scott, with his North Country accent and his habit of quoting Eastern religious texts. The committee suggested Chris bring a
long a second doctor, so he invited Jim Duff, a British army medical officer. Finally, there was the media: the BBC wished to send four people, and the Sunday Times was sending a reporter.
Chris based his expedition strategy partly on the approach that John Hunt had taken in 1953. He also engaged a professional programmer with access to a mainframe computer to work out logistics and test various schemes for establishing and stocking camps on the mountain. He sent most of the gear and food overland, leaving a cushion for accidents and setbacks, and was delighted when the two trucks arrived safely in Kathmandu. Mike Cheney arranged for the local Sherpa cooperative to transfer everything to the Luglha (now Lukla) airstrip, a day’s march from the Sherpa settlements below Everest. Cheney also recruited porters. He needed hundreds of them to help carry the expedition’s twenty-seven tons of equipment and thirteen tons of food to Base Camp; sixty or so more experienced men would ferry supplies through the Icefall and up the Southwest Face.
The climbers assembled in Kathmandu in early August. They traveled by road to Lamosangu, where Chris divided them into two parties for the approach march. His own group included his two closest cronies, Dougal and Nick, with Mick and Charlie Clarke; also most of the BBC crew. The second group—they immediately dubbed themselves the B Team—included Hamish MacInnes, Doug Scott and Martin Boysen as well as the new boy, Peter Boardman.
Peter was impressed by his illustrious companions, and enthralled by his surroundings. He took in the prayer flags and the water buffaloes and the often sweet-faced villagers along the route. He listened to the talk of his fellow climbers—seasoned veterans of major Himalayan expeditions who seemed to take it all in stride, and who teased him endlessly about his position in the British mountaineering bureaucracy—Peter had recently taken an office job at the British Mountaineering Council. He watched bemused as camp servants served tea from steaming kettles to grubby, longhaired Britons who sat segregated in their mess tent; the scene brought to his mind the imperialist explorers of an earlier time.
The approach march took two weeks. Chris brooded over his plans for the mountain and sounded out various climbers. He knew very well that any decision he made regarding their roles on the peak would anger and disappoint some of them. Dougal Haston thought himself the best man to summit the peak, and wasn’t prepared to give way in favor of other climbers. Dougal wanted Doug Scott for a partner, but Chris rejected that idea for now. He wasn’t ready to pair off his two strongest climbers. The others would figure he’d picked his summit team, and they’d be right. Nick Estcourt as usual refused to put himself forward. He told Chris he’d accept any role assigned to him. Mick Burke, who had his filming to do, also was content to let Chris arrange things. Doug Scott and Hamish MacInnes seemed willing to cooperate as well.
Any thoughts of the summit seemed premature. Chris by now was fighting dysentery. Hamish was still getting over an infection he’d contracted in Kathmandu. Mike Cheney was suffering from an undiagnosed ailment; his symptoms included weakness and severe abdominal pain.
Charlie Clarke watched the Sherpas slaughter a black goat one evening. The scene left him thoughtful, frightened of the mountain they were approaching—in particular the Icefall. He listened half-horrified to the others’ casual talk about Ian Clough and Tony Tighe; people talked as if no one realized that the two men had died—had actually died—on expeditions very like this one. Charlie found it especially distressing that Dougal still wore Tony’s floppy hat.
Bonington’s party reached the Sherpa village of Khumde on August 14. Doug’s group arrived two days later. The team spent several days unpacking and reorganizing gear. Chris sent Dougal and Nick ahead to scout for a good site for Base Camp and inspect the Icefall.
Bonington’s group set out for Base Camp on August 18; the second group would follow a day or two later. Chris and Charlie Clarke agreed to walk up together, taking the journey in easy stages. Charlie watched a Sherpa take leave of his wife and three children, who stood with the man around a juniper fire, praying for his safe return. Charlie thought of his own family—his wife, Ruth, and their daughter, Rebecca, aged four.
Chris and Charlie spent that night on a hillside beneath the Tengpoche monastery. The next morning they walked up to receive the old Lama’s blessing. He told them what he’d told Chris and his companions three years before: If you work together and do not argue among yourselves, you have a chance of climbing the mountain.
CHRIS’S GROUP LEFT the Lama and walked up to Pheriche, which in recent years had become a haven for trekkers, with a half-dozen guesthouses. Chris found himself distressed at the changes he saw in the area. A place such as this one would have been virtually empty of travelers a decade earlier. He cheered up on learning that an old friend—a Sherpa named Nima—owned one of the guesthouses. Nima had served as a high-altitude porter on the Annapurna expedition five years before. It was pleasant catching up with an old friend, and Nima seemed happy in his newfound prosperity.
It took another three days for Chris and his party to reach the site of Everest Base Camp. Sherpas came and went among the boulders, ferrying loads across the snow. Dougal and Nick were already up in the Icefall, having a look. The second group of climbers and porters arrived at Base Camp the next day—August 23.
The temperature rose on August 24, so that it was too warm to enter the Icefall. The Sherpas instead held a ceremony to consecrate Base Camp. The Sherpas chanted and shouted; they prayed and laughed, throwing rice and tsampa in fistfuls. They built a fire and made their offerings to their mountain, Sagarmatha—Nepalese for Head of the Ocean. Their good spirits and their piety moved Chris; he felt a responsibility to them even as he recognized that he couldn’t keep them safe. A Sherpa presented him a tray with a bottle of rum; another, his face lit by a smile devoid of self-consciousness, planted himself in front of Chris and reached to wrap a scarf around the Englishman’s neck.
Chris learned that very evening that one of the youngest porters—a deaf and dumb boy named Mingma—was missing. Mingma was helping to ferry loads to Base Camp from Gorak Shep, the expedition’s staging point at the bottom of the Khumbu Glacier. The other Sherpas tended to leave Mingma to himself; communication with him was difficult. But Doug Scott—along with Don Whillans and Hamish MacInnes—had stayed with Mingma’s family in Pheriche during the International Everest expedition in the spring of 1972. Doug had made a point of spending time with the boy on this trip; had even helped Mingma carry his load.
Mingma had set out to make a carry to Base Camp that morning, and had not yet returned to Gorak Shep. When he failed to turn up the following morning, Chris organized six small search parties, equipping each group with a radio. Doug took three Sherpas, and searched with genuine urgency until Adrian Gordon came on the radio to say that his group had come upon a body in a stream. Doug made his way to the body and lifted it from the water. His sense of responsibility for the boy made this tragedy particularly hard to bear. Chris ran the two miles from Base Camp, his mind playing odd tricks—his steps on the glacier were oddly loud—and arrived breathless, unable to speak. He saw Doug and crossed to him. They wrapped their arms around each other, both of them in tears, Doug sobbing in his grief and his guilt over the death of this boy. Chris tried to console him, spoke of his own first child, also drowned in a stream. It was odd and deeply painful to reflect that Conrad would have been a teenager now. Bonington’s own child and Doug’s young friend had been almost contemporaries, born into different worlds but now both of them gone in much the same way, only under different skies.
The climbers and porters stood and milled uncertainly in that ancient, barren wilderness, ordinarily empty of men. Most of them were young; some were mere boys, as Mingma had been. His corpse had curled and bent into a kind of question mark: where had he gone? The expedition had ventured into this vast emptiness, displacing it as a swimmer displaces water. Now one of their numbers had drowned; the emptiness had occupied him as if in turnabout. Mingma was not different from the rest of them, or p
erhaps his silence had made him more vulnerable. Maybe the void had mistaken him for itself. It might be that some balance or equilibrium was restored. Maybe the rest of them were safer now. Or it might be that this mountain was angry; Mingma’s death might be a sort of warning. Some of the porters were frightened.
There was no talk of quitting the expedition. The boy was in fact a stranger to most of the climbers and his death made him seem still more of a stranger. The climbers and porters continued their work. They were making a route up through the Icefall, perhaps the most dangerous work of the expedition, creating a path through the shifting maze of crevasses and teetering cliffs and towers of ice. The white looming shapes were like enormous tombstones or buildings—the place sometimes had the feel of an urban churchyard. It was hard to forget that this place had buried Tony Tighe three years before. His crushed and frozen corpse was somewhere beneath them—and with it the remnants of others, Sherpa and Westerner. The climbers and the hired porters were building their path to the Southwest Face on top of a slow motion avalanche, a mass grave for the spectacularly unfortunate—for what were the odds of being born to die here?
Once here, of course, the risk was very real. They might fall into a crevasse or die under the weight of a collapse; there was also a significant risk of avalanche now, so soon after the monsoon snows. They worked in shadow and cold and at moments forgot the sun until it spilled across the ice and set it creaking and shifting beneath and around them. The heat was stupefying and also dangerous as it set about its work of undoing the ground they stood upon. They gasped and suffered from the altitude. Young Peter Boardman was relieved to see that Dougal and Nick and the others who dwelt within Bonington’s exalted inner circle struggled and sweated at their work just as he did—sometimes perhaps a bit more.
Chris on August 26 led a party to consolidate the lower sections of the route while Doug and Dougal climbed ahead to make more progress higher up. Chris called across a snow slope to Mike Rhodes—the fair-haired young father of three, the Barclays Bank man—to come and help bridge a crevasse. Mike walked toward him, forgetting to clip into a safety rope, and dropped through the snow to his shoulders, his feet dangling over a space that brought to his racing mind an enormous black cathedral, roofless and empty. Someone tossed him a rope’s end. Rhodes seized it and scrambled out, more astonished than terrified at his near miss.