by Ben Fogle
It was a feeling of being out of my depth. The negative voice in my head had appeared, and for the first, and certainly not the last time, the doubts settled in. I was too inexperienced. I berated myself. I wasn’t up to it. Everyone around me appeared to be veteran climbers with years of experience under their belt.
It’s amazing how the panic can spread both physically and mentally. I was overcome with what I can only describe as doom. It’s like the whole body just gives up trying. It’s like you have given in to the darkness and allow the negativity to flood through you. It steals your breath. My heart was racing. I wanted to lie down and give up. Most of all, I wanted to click my boot heels together and return home.
Except I didn’t really. The negative voice is all part of the Everest challenge. How to drown it out, how to silence and control it, are part of the second-by-second struggle of climbing the mountain.
In the past, I’ve been able to draw on previous experiences. I thought back to the time I jumped in with the crocodiles. The time we capsized on the Atlantic. I tried to draw the dark clouds from my mind and replace them with the bright light of hope and confidence.
‘You can do this, Ben,’ I repeated in my head.
‘Just focus,’ I repeated over and over.
I managed to ascend the small wall of ice. I collapsed on the top, unable to move. I had to crawl from the edge on all fours. Breathless and sweaty, things weren’t looking good.
I regained my composure and we were off again through the meandering field of ice. We zig-zagged around huge blocks of ice until we reached our first ladder.
The ladders of Everest are almost as famous as the mountain itself. Sometimes with up to four ladders all lashed taut, they are used as temporary bridges to span the crevasses that cut across the icefall like lightning bolts. These crevasses can be hundreds of feet deep and 20 feet wide. The ladders have been used for many years as an easily adjustable way of breaching and crossing the huge gaps and fissures that spread across the icefall like veins.
As the glacier shifts, so too does the icefall. Crevasses open and close, widen and narrow. The ladders are put in place by an expert team of sherpas called the Icefall Doctors, who traverse the route daily, adding new ladders and ropes through the ice.
Our first crevasse was about 10 feet wide, enough to need two aluminium ladders lashed together in the middle with ropes. Two guide ropes, onto which we could clip safety lines attached to our harnesses, stretched across the gap. These safety lines would stop us from disappearing into the depths of the crevasse and certain death.
There was little chance of surviving a fall into one of these bottomless cracks in the ice. Instant death would certainly be preferable to surviving a fall and ending up in the cavernous depths, hundreds of feet beneath a glacier and far from any chance of rescue. It used to make me shiver just thinking about it.
Very carefully, I clipped my safety lines onto the guide ropes and gingerly placed one foot on the ladder.
Have you ever tried walking across a horizontal ladder? Probably not, because they are much easier to climb when vertical, which is what they are made for. Traversing a horizontal ladder is one thing, but try doing it wearing clunky boots with crampons, in the dark, across a seemingly bottomless drop, in thin, oxygen-deprived air and it’s a whole other challenge.
My size 12 boots were large enough to span the gap between rungs, but the crampons were spaced to wedge nicely between them too. It meant that each step locked my foot into the ladder like a Lego brick. It took quite a force to pull it from the rungs. If I pulled too hard, I risked falling off balance and plunging into the abyss.
I took a step. Staring ahead of me, heart racing, I have never focused so hard as I lifted one foot in front of the other. The two ladders began to bow and wobble as I reached the rudimentary rope that lashed the two together in the middle. I could feel a bead of sweat on my brow.
My left foot wouldn’t budge. My crampon had wedged itself hard against one of the ropes. I couldn’t lift it from the ladder. I didn’t want to look down, but I needed to see what had happened. A small pool of torchlight illuminated the sides of the icy crevasse. I felt dizzy. I wriggled my foot free and carefully made my way across the rest of the ladder. I leapt the final rung. I wanted to kiss the ground. The relief of getting off that ladder was overwhelming. I felt a buzz of endorphins and euphoria. It was surprisingly uplifting for 5 am.
By now the faint outline of dawn had painted the horizon with a soft hue of pink. Daybreak was quick to follow and within 15 minutes there was no longer any need for a headtorch. The reflection of the early morning sky in the snow and ice was dazzling even at 5.15 am.
With dawn came the realisation of where we were. I could clearly make out Base Camp. It was ‘right there’, seemingly within touching distance. It hardly felt like we had made any headway at all; what’s more, I could now make out the magnitude of this icy world. I could see every drop, every hole, crevasse and fin of ice. If you took a great slab of snow and ice and dropped it on the floor, then did it again, and then again, this is what it would resemble.
We continued to weave and meander through the icy obstacle course, through our own little maze, over more crevasses, some needing just a single ladder, others demanding three ladders roped together that swayed with each step. Sometimes the ladders went upwards, other times they went down steeply. Sometimes they were lashed vertically against a cliff face.
Up, down, in, out, we weaved. By now we were alone in the icefall. Halfway up is an area known as the football field. It was the only area in the icefall wide enough to stop for a sip of tea and some Haribo.
We didn’t stop for long. We still had several hours of climbing and we were about to reach the most dangerous part of the Khumbu Icefall.
As the icefall narrows nearer to Camp 1, the route trails perilously close to the side where enormous seracs, huge walls of unstable ice, cling. It’s the collapse of these vulnerable and unsecure seracs that causes the frequent avalanches in the Khumbu Valley.
I watched as Kenton looked above us and shook his head, ‘Right, no stopping, no filming. I want everyone to get through here as fast as possible.’ I learned to watch Kenton and Mark in much the same way that I observe the crew on a plane when there is turbulence. If they continue chatting with one another, unaffected, then I relax. One glimmer of fear and you know you’re in trouble.
For the first time on the mountain, I saw concern in their eyes.
The temperature had plunged, down to minus 20 °C. Kenton had warned us that 6 am is the coldest time of the day in the Khumbu and he wasn’t wrong. It was bitterly cold. I could feel the freezing wind chafing my cheeks. This was frostbite weather. Exposed skin freezes and the cells die. I pulled my buff high up onto my face and pulled my hat down close to my sunglasses – the sun’s glare off the ice and snow was intense.
We were shattered and freezing as we finally summited a narrow ridgeline and spotted a small cluster of tents in the distance – Camp 1. Up and down a series of leg-sapping undulations in the glacier and we finally reached the windswept tents. Camp 1 is more of a transit camp. Climbers, like us, use it to acclimatise during their first rotation, but after that it is merely a stopping point on the way to the better organised and resourced Camp 2, further up the valley. The camp had a temporary feeling. I counted about 20 tents.
Ant and Ed, who had arrived the day before us, were still wrapped up in their sleeping bags against the chill. As we would be ‘hot bedding’, we had to wait for them to get up, pack and leave before we could get into the tent ourselves. We had to pace up and down, stomping our feet and swinging our arms to keep the cold at bay. I marched up and down the tiny camp trying to keep the blood flowing through my chilled body. The sweat that had dampened my thermal layers during the strenuous climb was chilling me to the core.
The wind had picked up and the temperature had plummeted still further. It was 8 am and I couldn’t wait for the comparative warmth and protection of the
tent. Ed and Ant weren’t in a rush to pack up. I couldn’t blame them, but I wanted to throttle them.
With the bitter wind, it felt pretty inhospitable. Victoria had gone ahead of me in the ascent and had arrived before me. Numbed from the cold, she had started showing the first signs of hypothermia. She was shaking violently, and her lips were blue. Although I was cold, I was surprised at how badly she had reacted.
Finally, Ed and Ant emerged from the tent and we were able to bundle Victoria into her sleeping bag. I crawled into the little tent next to her and pulled off my heavy boots. It had only taken us five hours to get through the icefall, but I felt emotionally and physically drained, and now I was concerned for Victoria.
With our little stove we melted some snow to make a warm cup of tea sweetened with sugar. You’ll never really appreciate the full qualities of a hot cuppa until you are in a tent up at 6,000 metres in the Himalayas.
The wind beat at our tent with its ice-cold sting. It was still early morning and I couldn’t wait for the heat of the sun’s rays to warm us up. I didn’t need to wait for long. From the ice-encrusted minus 20 °C of the morning, the tent transformed from igloo to sauna. The intensity of the sun was astonishing as her ferocious rays built the temperature in the tent up to nearly 35 °C. I lay there in my underwear, sweating. We opened all the vents and doors and used our sleeping bags to drape over the top of the tent to try and make a sunscreen, which worked surprisingly well.
I never expected the heat to be so overpowering as I lay there sweltering and sweating. Occasionally, it became too much and I would spring from the tent into the dazzling white snow. Even outside, the power of the rays was so intense that after just a few minutes, I needed to retreat back into the tent.
A warm cup of tea and the heat had revived Victoria from her hypothermia, but now she was feeling the early effects of altitude sickness. She had a banging headache and was feeling nauseous. Although unsurprising at 6,000 metres of elevation, the intensity of her symptoms was worrying Kenton.
We decided to give her supplementary oxygen. Most climbers don’t require extra O’s (as oxygen is known on the mountain) until they reach Camp 3 at 7,000 metres, almost a vertical kilometre above us, and although it is often administered as a medicine at intervals to revive and alleviate symptoms, it was certainly a concern that at such an early stage, Victoria already required extra oxygen.
We also had to account for extra usage. Getting bottled oxygen to key points up and down the mountain was crucial to the success of our expedition. Known as caches, these drop-off points had to be carefully planned to ensure enough oxygen for the whole team.
Victoria and I dozed and chatted through the heat of the day. We ate a rehydrated meal and played cards until the sun went down, and with it the oven-like heat replaced by a freezer-like chill. From sweating in my underpants less than an hour before, I found myself shivering inside my summit sleeping bag.
None of us slept much that night. I had my first experience of altitude-induced sleep apnoea – in a particular form known as Cheyne-Stokes respiration. Every time I dozed off, I found myself waking up, unable to breathe. It felt like I was drowning or suffocating. It is deeply, deeply unpleasant and the worry had a spiralling effect on my ability to sleep, to the point that I became genuinely fearful of sleeping in case I suffocated to death.
We were only at Camp 1, nearly three vertical kilometres from the summit, and Vic and I were both already struggling. Morning couldn’t come soon enough, and in the frozen chill of dawn, before the sun’s heat took effect, we headed off towards Camp 2, just 400 metres up the valley.
I was surprised by how exhausting and draining that short distance was to cover. The gradient was disarmingly shallow. It looked like a breeze, but by the time Camp 2 came into view, I felt like I had done several rounds in the boxing ring.
We could see the camp for hours before we arrived. It was spread out along the side of the valley, tantalising us, but we never seemed to get any closer. It was agonisingly slow progress as we inched our way up the valley. By now the sun had reached full intensity and sapped us further of our energy.
Finally, we reached the first tent, but as we would soon learn on Everest, nothing is as it seems. It would take more than an hour and a half to climb through Camp 2 to the upper part where we were based.
That climb seemed to go on forever. Frequently forced to stop and sit down from exhaustion, I was very nearly defeated. Not that I had any option. As was so often the case here, the only way was up.
The relief of finally reaching our little encampment was overwhelming, and once again a cup of sweet tea brought me back to life. In the small mess tent were the rest of the climbers with whom we’d shared Base Camp. They were an eclectic mix of individuals. There was a 20-year-old tech billionaire, a hedge fund manager and a CIA agent, as well as ex-SBS soldier Ant and cameraman Ed.
They were all squashed into this little tent watching The Revenant on an iPad. It seemed a strange choice of film to watch at 6,400 metres, but it was a welcome distraction from the increased altitude and the reduced oxygen in the thin air.
We spent the next day resting and acclimatising while the rest of the group descended. Ed and Ant had decided to try for Camp 3 on their first rotation. By doing so, they were hoping that they could try for the summit on their second rotation rather than the third. It was a risky bid, and one that Kenton wasn’t prepared to try with us.
High-altitude climbing requires time and patience and Kenton wanted to maximise our chances of success with as much acclimatisation as we could get. To avoid languishing in the sauna-like tents, Kenton had suggested a short climb to the base of the Lhotse Face, on the wall of which Camp 3 is cut into a ledge.
We made a leisurely stroll up to its vertiginous wall. It looked terrifying. Once again, I was reminded of the Wall in Game of Thrones. It was here that Kenton had found a sherpa hanging from his safety rope with half his head missing. The experience had affected him deeply after he had recovered the body. No one ever really understood what had happened, and Kenton assumed it was a freak accident in which he had been hit on the head by a large piece of rock or ice.
We returned to Camp 2 for a rest and some food. Once again, I found myself suffering from sleep apnoea. What would happen if I had this all the way to the summit? I wasn’t sure I could sustain my mental and physical capabilities on so little sleep.
It was about 4 pm when things started going wrong. Victoria and I were in the tent together. She had been sleeping, but now she was sitting bolt upright. Her face was pale, her eyes sunken. She stared blankly into the distance, holding her hands to her temples. She complained of an unbearable headache and she seemed confused. I fished around in my bag for the pulse oximeter, I clipped it to her finger, and it read 38 per cent. It had to be wrong. I tried it again. This time it read 35 per cent. A ‘normal’ reading would be between 95 and 100 per cent, indicating normal levels of oxygen saturation in the blood. Anything under 90 per cent is considered ‘low’. When it dips below 84 per cent, in the words of one online analysis, ‘it’s time to go to hospital’.
I was sure it must be broken, so tried it on my finger. It read 89 per cent. Again, I clipped it to Victoria’s: 36 per cent. I reached for her bottle of oxygen and pulled the mask onto her face and cranked up the flow rate to its maximum and then went to get Kenton. He was in the mess tent with Mark, playing cards with Ant and Ed.
As I was explaining my concern to Kenton, Victoria unzipped the tent and stumbled through the doorway. Unable to control her balance, she lurched and swayed like a drunk before collapsing on the floor.
‘It feels like knitting needles are being stuck into my brain,’ she stammered. She was slurring her words.
‘My oxygen saturation was 29 per cent.’
‘WHAT?!’ gasped Kenton.
I looked at the shocked faces around us and ran to our tent to fetch the oxygen cylinder and mask. Again, we strapped it to her face and Kenton poured some medicine into he
r mouth. I sat there on the tent floor holding her hand. She was suffering acute mountain sickness and we had to get her down the mountain as quickly as possible.
It was too late to begin a night-time descent. With supplementary oxygen and Acetazolamide – the go-to drug to prevent and reduce the symptoms of altitude sickness – she would stabilise, but we had to make a rapid departure at first light to get back to Base Camp where she could get medical help.
A mixture of sleep apnoea and concern for Victoria meant I didn’t sleep that night.
Had we taken a risk too far?
Risk is a strange thing. It’s something we, as a society, have largely tried to expunge and eradicate. It is often hidden behind the façade of Health and Safety, but in reality it is much bigger than that. I could eulogise about ‘when I was a boy’, but to be honest our risk-averse culture is far older than that. In some ways, risk comes with humanity. We all take some form of risk on a daily basis, only we now use technology to mitigate and minimise those risks. Risk of course comes in many different forms: financial, work, relationships, to name just a few, but of course it is the risk of injury or death of which we are arguably most fearful. Some people make careers out of confronting risk. Miners, deep-sea trawlermen, soldiers, police … you get my point. And there are also sports like Formula One and mountaineering where the risk of death is ever present. Risk is still out there despite what we have done to try and tame it.
The problem comes down to who sets the criteria for risks and their management. When governments do it, we blame the ‘nanny state’, and when schools do it we blame ‘’elf and safety’.
Another strange symptom of society is our need to justify everything we do. Back in the heroic days of exploration, it was all done for King and country. I don’t think you’d get away with it today – ‘doing it for Queen and country’ doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. When asked why he was trying to climb Everest, George Mallory famously answered ‘because it’s there’. Of course, this quote needs to be taken in the context of the time. He had just returned from the horrors of World War I; had lost friends and in many respects his old life. For Mallory, the mountain provided a focus and a reason to live.