The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  Doug and Dougal meanwhile reached the top of the Icefall. They soon discovered a place for Camp One, an island of snow surrounded by deep moats that would protect them from slides. It stood just at the foot of the Western Cwm, the great snow basin that lay like a sea of clouds below the dark expanses of the Southwest Face. They stood and looked across toward the bottom of the face to the place where the mountain seemed to rise from the snow. It was possible to imagine the roots of the mountain—what lay beneath the snow in the still darker vastness of the earth herself. Dougal cast his mind back to the mountain unborn, still one of the infinite number of possible mountains dormant in the planet’s many wombs.

  The climbers and porters spent a day consolidating the upper part of the route through the Icefall. They began ferrying loads to the newly established Camp One on August 28. This put them well ahead of their 1972 schedule—Chris in fact worried that they might be too early. Huge avalanches—partly remnants of the monsoon—billowed down the walls of Everest and neighboring Nuptse each afternoon to sweep across the cwm above Camp One.

  Doug and Dougal spent three days threading their way past crevasses in search of a site for Camp Two. The other climbers followed in support, building ladder bridges across the worst gaps in the route, preparing a way for the porters to carry supplies to higher camps. Sherpas—thirty to forty on a given day—meanwhile ferried loads through the Icefall to Camp One.

  Mornings in the Western Cwm dawned gray and after a time turned gold; this lasted until the sun hit the high snows of the surrounding peaks, when things went a blinding white. Mist and snow arrived toward the middle of each day; climbers and Sherpas listened in the afternoon to the rumblings of more avalanches. They lay in their tents at night and wondered if Camp One were really safe. The newer hands—Ronnie Richards was one—listened nervously to the others joke about the likelihood that the camp and its inhabitants would tumble into the Icefall that lay just behind and below them.

  Dougal and Doug found a spot for Camp Two at the base of the Southwest Face. The climbers spent the next week stocking the new camp and sitting out a brief storm, debating the merits and risks of various lines up the face. They settled on their original line; the others were too exposed to avalanche.

  Doug and Mick Burke climbed onto the face itself on September 6, unreeling fixed rope for the first time on the expedition. Doug led most of the way; Mick filmed him. They stopped to rest. The basin beneath them was like a vast, half-frozen lake. They could imagine a country of formless power and darkness and surprise beneath it, as a sailor might imagine a world beneath the surface of the sea. Dark specks crawled across the snow in single file. These were the porters bringing loads to Camp Two, a huddle of orange tents and brown box shelters, invaders or settlers come to sully a new world with their noise and clutter. Doug and Mick climbed 1,200 feet to the base of a buttress—this was the site they’d chosen for Camp Three—and descended. They were due for a rest.

  Nick Estcourt and Tut Braithwaite had moved up to Camp Two that day. They followed the ropes to Camp Three on September 7, reaching the new site early in the day. They continued to climb, fixing rope up through soft snow until the sun swept out onto the face and the heat brought them to a stop. They followed the ropes back down to Camp Three, wading now through soft, wet snow that gave way beneath their boots.

  Nick and Tut spent another two days fixing rope up slabs of snow that threatened to break away and carry them off the face. The climbing wasn’t difficult but the scale of the place was frightening. Occasional powder avalanches added to their sense of insecurity. They put in two more days climbing, establishing Camp Four at 23,700 feet and then fixing rope up into the Great Central Gully that split the face.

  Martin Boysen and Peter Boardman reached Camp Four on September 11 and climbed on, fixing rope on the snow slopes above the site. Dougal and Hamish arrived at Camp Four the same day. Chris had come up as well to help in the work hacking out tent platforms and setting up shelters.

  The climbers were making good progress on the route. There was a sense among them that this time the summit was perhaps in the cards. Their hopes turned them inward and they were less patient with one another. Martin thought young Peter Boardman seemed unduly impressed by some of the bigger names; Peter would get busy helping Hamish set up his shelter and then ask Martin to fetch his camera or hand him a tent peg. Still, Martin liked him; everyone did. Peter was performing well on the mountain; he was surprisingly strong and clearly determined to get up the face and have his own shot at the summit.

  Peter was aware of some slight condescension or coolness on Martin’s part. And Dougal was remote—but Hamish was cheerful and friendly. Hamish was almost twice Peter’s age; the gap made competition between them ridiculous. It had been a long time—more than two decades—since Hamish had taken young Chris Bonington up those first terrifying climbs in Scotland. Hamish had maintained a certain distance from the Bonington circle—or circus, as it sometimes seemed these days—but he was fourty-four years old; he wouldn’t have many more chances at getting up Everest. He had taken the lead in building the road through the Icefall, bringing to bear his engineering skills. Meanwhile, he was enjoying himself.

  Chris descended the face that afternoon. The others settled in at the newly established Camp Four, their shelters pinioned to the snow slope by various anchors. Small avalanches buffeted the camp during the night; at one point Hamish was half-convinced that they would be swept, tents and all, from their perch. All four climbers slept fitfully. They woke in the morning to more settled conditions, but the two Sherpas who had shared camp with them were subdued; they didn’t like the look of the freshly loaded snow slopes that lay above the camp.

  Dougal and Hamish set off ahead of the others. They were both moving strongly. Hamish, climbing without oxygen—his set had malfunctioned—was pleased to find that he could keep pace with his younger companion. He carried on, struggling a little with the jumars—they slipped on the frozen rope that Peter and Martin had fixed the previous day. He was engaged in his task and he resisted for a beat the impulse to raise his head to investigate a sound and as he did look up the avalanche arrived. He kept his feet long enough to wrap the fixed rope around his hand—he didn’t trust the jumars to grip the rope’s icy sheath. A fog of ice crystals seemed to fill his lungs and the thick, sliding mass at his legs tore him from his footing. He hung by his hand, near drowning as the snow covered him. His mind skimmed various questions but the battering and the pain in his hand and also his need to breathe prevented him from settling upon any of them.

  The avalanche passed and he lay in the snow, gasping and retching and slowly coming back to himself—this oddly helpless creature. Dougal had watched the slide from his perch higher above. He climbed quickly down to Hamish and helped him to his feet and they retraced their steps to camp. Hamish had trouble getting his breath; the powder snow had gotten into his lungs. He rested that afternoon but he slept poorly that night, still unable to breath freely even with the help of bottled oxygen. He felt very weak. He retreated to Camp Two the next morning.

  The others—Peter and Martin and Dougal—went up to find a site for Camp Five. They settled on some narrow ledges, which offered a view into the gully that led up into the Rock Band. The Western Cwm lay far below them, its enormity dwarfed by distance. Nuptse rose up from the other side of the valley; Everest’s sister peak was vast and black and snow-dappled, dwarfed in its turn by the sky. The climbers could peer across and past to a view that disappeared into infinite depths—bank after bank of clouds lay crumpled and matted like a feather quilt. The climbers felt their own emptiness; they fell into their own huge blue silence. The clouds below them gently shifted, formed and reformed.

  They returned to Camp Four for the night. They were far from home. They woke to cold in the mornings. The cold forced upon them a near-paranoid awareness, the keeping track of fingers and toes until the sun rose high enough to warm their shelters. The very world shifted with the sun’
s appearance; they glimpsed the sun’s power.

  Peter and Martin descended the face on September 14. They needed a rest after three days out front. Dougal remained at Camp Four. He wanted some time away from the others. He spent the afternoon reading letters and daydreaming in MacInnes Box. The wind rose at nightfall, and it began to snow. He woke to the sounds of snow moving, shapes sliding past the tent; it must be from the snowfields on the route to the old Camp Six. A great deal of snow had come down, and as Dougal listened something heavy slammed into the shelter and knocked him across the floor. He lay sprawled, overcome by a sense of his own failings, his ignorance; he didn’t know what was happening or how it would end—was he falling or not?

  The avalanche passed. The shelter remained moored to the mountain. Dougal dressed, putting on his boots so that he could leave quickly if another avalanche hit. There were no more—only small, hissing slides whose sounds merged with the sound of the wind that slid across his shelter like water past a stone bottom. He peered outside and saw that the slide had buried the other shelter; he was lucky to be in this one. He felt himself a sort of ghost, gazing across at the scene of the death of some other self.

  Dougal sometimes felt in the mountains that his death took notice of him. He lost most of his shyness—his fear—when that happened. The notion of himself as a ghost appealed to him. He sometimes awoke believing that he had become a ghost and had talked to the ghost of the boy on the road. Dougal thought he would like to haunt a place like this—high and precarious, almost unfindable—and he felt a little that he was doing it now. He looked across the snow to the buried tent and saw a glimpse of the mistake or the moment that would finish him.

  He lay alone and afraid through the rest of the night as a pagan might lie on an altar. He was not a victim. He offered himself as a flesh-and-bone prayer. He felt the blood and breath move in his body in the vast unthinking motion of this place. He left Camp Five early in the morning and descended the ropes to the others; as he lost height he felt within him the thin exultance of a ghost, invulnerable and taskless, untouchable.

  He encountered Chris, who was on his way up the mountain with Ronnie Richards. Chris wanted to inspect the line the climbers were forging up the face; and he wanted some time in the lead. Chris and Ronnie continued up the ropes to Camp Four. They dug out the shelters—the damage wasn’t as bad as Dougal had believed—and spent the night there. The next day, September 16, they made a carry to Camp Five. Chris was impressed by the situation, tucked in beneath the walls of a buttress, the mountain falling away beneath them into distance that was like time; it could be crossed, but at a pace they could not fix or change.

  Chris and Ronnie spent much of the day digging a platform in the ice and erecting a single box shelter. The altitude was like an illness. They moved slowly at their work, digging and sweating, slaves on an alien moon. They slept that night on bottled oxygen, their faces buried in the buglike masks. The hissing of the cylinders in the apparatus echoed like the breath of some unspeaking creature, sounds of breathing in a cave.

  They set off early in the morning. They were aiming for the bottom of the Rock Band, but Chris made a route-finding mistake. They wasted the morning, moving slowly higher on dangerously thin snow that was difficult to climb and impossible to protect adequately. Chris admitted his mistake and the climbers reversed two long pitches, finding their way back across and then up through deeper snow. It was very warm by now, so they retreated to camp. They fixed the rest of their rope the next morning and descended.

  Doug Scott and Mick Burke greeted them at Camp Five. Chris continued down to meet one of the support climbers, Jim Duff. Jim was making a carry from Camp Four. Chris found him sitting in the snow, slurring his words; he was clearly hypothermic. Chris took Jim’s load and sent him back down the fixed ropes, then turned and climbed back to Camp Five. He reached it in time for the afternoon radio call—which brought the news that Jim was missing. Nick Estcourt and Tut Braithwaite climbed up from Camp Four and soon came upon him; Jim was barely conscious, slumped in the snow just below where Chris had last seen him. The two rescuers got him back down to Camp Four, where they wrapped him in a sleeping bag and revived him with hot drinks.

  The expedition was gaining momentum. Eight fresh Sherpas arrived at Camp Four that night—September 18—ready to ferry more gear to Camp Five. Chris and Doug climbed above Camp Five the next day, moving through deep snow nearly to the foot of the Rock Band. Nick and Tut joined them at Camp Five that afternoon.

  Chris was now ready to announce his plans for the first summit team. He wanted the strongest pair to take the first shot; a change in the weather might make a second attempt impossible. He decided to bring Dougal up from Camp Two to Camp Five so that Dougal and Doug Scott could go for the summit together.

  Dougal’s climb up from Camp Two would take two days. Nick Estcourt and Tut Braithwaite could use that time to try to climb the Rock Band, which would bring them to the start of the route’s final section. The Rock Band was a major plum—the hardest technical climbing on the face—but it would leave them exhausted, probably too tired to participate in any summit attempt. Nick would once again sacrifice his shot at a major Himalayan summit for the sake of a Bonington-led expedition’s success.

  Chris announced his plans during the afternoon radio call on September 19. He hadn’t yet worked out who would make the subsequent summit attempts. He promised the climbers that he’d work on those assignments the next day.

  SUNSET FROM CAMP Five seemed a benediction. A distant yellow orb sank in clouds that wafted beneath an ocean of blue, all of it framed below by black rock. Snow slopes beneath the camp fanned out into a gathering blue-black gloom, empty and quiet.

  Nick and Tut left camp early on September 20. They kicked steps toward the start of the gully that led into the Rock Band. Chris slept through their departure and awoke some time later feeling ragged and weary from his four-day stint at high camp. He and Mick waited for Sherpas who were bringing up more rope. Chris and Mick didn’t leave camp until the sun was already on the face, but they didn’t take long to climb the fixed ropes; they soon caught the others.

  Tut was leading the first pitch above the fixed ropes. He was moving very slowly on thin snow over rock. He couldn’t find anywhere to put a piton, but the climbing was just easy enough to beckon him onward. Each step left him more exposed, but it was far easier to move higher than to reverse his steps on such terrain. He carried on in hopes of finding some crack to fit a piton, or snow deep enough for a snow stake. He climbed with heavy boots, lugging his oxygen and encumbered by the mask; everything at 27,000 feet was difficult, and this ground was extremely dangerous. The mask made it hard to see, but Tut found a place to tap in an ice piton. He put in three more as he balanced across a difficult traverse. His pack threatened to disrupt his balance. He was relieved when at last the angle lay back and the snow grew deep enough to take a snow anchor. He clipped himself to the anchor and brought Nick up into the snow, which fanned down from the base of the gully proper. Chris and Mick Burke followed on the fixed rope.

  The four climbers peered up into the gully, twenty or so feet across, its boundaries black rock walls—a seeming corridor to the sky. Nick led into the snow at the very base of the gully. Chris felt his fear—the gully was a perfect funnel for avalanches that began on the upper regions of the face.

  Tut led the next pitch. He climbed to a chock stone—a huge boulder jammed across the gully—and squeezed past it. The gully narrowed and grew steeper; snow streamed down over huge overhangs like rain from a roof with no gutters. Tut put in a piton and the others followed. Tut led out again, across more snow. He spotted a ramp and moved toward it on small ledges, searching for handholds, absorbed in his task, and his oxygen cylinder ran out—a hand reaching from behind to cover his mouth and pinch his nostrils. He struggled to wrench his mask off, a diver swimming for the sunlit surface, feeling the suck and pull of green darkness beneath and around him. He came as close to falling as
seemed possible without actually falling. His preoccupation with the task of staying in balance distracted him from other tasks; he urinated as he fumbled at his mask. He got the mask off and sucked in the thin air and only then noticed the warmth on his leg. He recovered himself sufficiently to climb a short ridge of rock that delivered him to snow that was blessedly firm. He drove the shaft of his axe deeply into the snow and put a sling around the top of the axe and clipped his harness to it: his first protection in 100 feet. He’d come excruciatingly close to a fall that would certainly have killed him. He stood slumped and gasping for a while and when he could he took off his heavy oxygen cylinder and jammed it into the snow for a better anchor. He brought Nick up and then Chris and Mick.

  The gully here grew wider and split in two. The main arm ran up to the left. Tut’s ramp led right, below rock that had gone a hazy yellow in the high light. Nick took over the lead. He moved right to an island of rock that would take a real anchor. He built the new anchor and brought Tut up. Nick’s oxygen was gone now; he felt its absence as he set out to lead another pitch.

  The first bit was easy, but the holds petered out. Nick jammed his left arm into a snow bank that bordered the wall, and leaned back and right to look for a piton placement. He cleared snow from smooth rock as his goggles grew foggy. He found a crack and felt for a piton that hung from the back of his harness. He was wearing gloves and so he couldn’t find the piton at first but then he had it out and was groping for the hammer in his holster—all of this taking its toll at an altitude of well over 27,000 feet. Nick placed the piton somehow; it was not a solid placement but he could weight it just a little as he moved his feet higher on the wall. He found more snow and pulled himself higher and into sunlight. He climbed another 20 feet of soft snow on loose rock, and at last found a crack that would take a good piton. His happiness simmered in him—he had never worked harder on a pitch. It was the hardest climbing on the route, maybe the hardest ever done at this altitude.