White Mountain

by Robert Twigger

  If Mallory was the first, then his sacrifice will be less in vain; it will, by sleight of hand, justify his death – which is an awkward reminder to all climbers that we are in fact mortal.

  The other dead include those who were ignored as they stumbled about in a hypoxic haze. Such is the difficulty of looking after yourself at high altitude, morality changes to fit the possible rather than the desired outcome. Commercial clients have neither the expertise nor inclination to help other ‘customers’ who have made a mistake, perhaps just a tiny miscalculation, which at 8,000 metres becomes fatal. I have read accounts where a commercial client boasts, almost, of his regret at not helping another . . . because I felt this put him in the same tragic-heroic capacity as those on earlier disaster climbs such as 1996. He was now a bona fide Everest climber, weighed down by regrets and a dose of ‘real life’ in seeing corpses and not helping those on their way to becoming one.

  Climbing attracts all kinds, from the leftist to the fascist sympathiser: Julius Evola, Heidegger, the Nazi-sponsored attempts on the Eiger – perhaps it calls to the heartless part in all of us to see others fail and us succeed. I know that this competitive urge to overtake those weaker than oneself is always apparent on any hill or peak.

  The icefall on the southern side literally eats aluminium ladders and ropes. It is the most dangerous place to be on the mountain – tottering seracs the size of a house can smash down on you at any time. The ‘Icedoctors’ are a team of Sherpas dedicated to fixing rope and ladders through this maze of ice. Every year there are fatalities in the icefall. The metal, crunched and fallen, the bodies of the dead swallowed by vast deep crevasses, all this slowly moves down the mountain. The glacier cannot digest these human remains; it merely preserves them, rather in the way a shark’s stomach carries old number plates, life preservers and a fishing float or two – not revealed until the shark is caught and cut open. The Khumbu Glacier has its own secrets; it serves a convenient mystifying purpose, rendering vague the too horrifying end of some people.

  The discarded is relied on by others. When Maurice Wilson attempted his mad solo climb of Everest in the 1930s he survived on food left behind by earlier expeditions. He found crampons but did not know how to use them . . . In 1996 a garbled message from the Moldavian team via Scott Fischer’s head Sherpa was sent – the implication was that all the ropes from the south summit onwards had been fixed. The expeditions that followed were relying on the discards of others. But they over-relied. The ropes had not been fixed. The resulting time lags contributed to the disaster that followed.

  If the mountain – and Everest is the mountain – is scarred and littered and yet is also the unreachable, we have the strange combination of a garbage-dump shrine. Russian-made oxygen bottles litter the upper reaches like syringes in a West Hollywood parking lot. The bottle, like some inflated steroidal syringe, is the ‘fix’ for the addicted climber. It is a mark of shame that he cannot climb unaided like the few pure ones who ascended without supplementary oxygen. A new orthodoxy claims that those who choose to climb without oxygen are ‘irresponsible’ and a danger to the fee-paying majority who do. Yet it is perfectly obvious that those who have only been able to ascend the heights with their bottled air account for almost all fatalities on Everest. This air, from the plains, is a sure sign of their interloper status – it allows the unreachable to be reached but also polluted in a double sense.

  That the majority, who are unable to ascend to the superathletic standards needed to make the summit unaided by oxygen, should round on the minority is a not unexpected sign of the times. In rock climbing, the use of bolts was sneered at in the past as cowardice or incompetence, but is now standard practice for high-level climbs. Soloing is used as a sort of placation of the old spirits of climbing – whereby a bolted climb will be ascended and practised using the safety of bolts and then climbed without (in a true solo rather than simply climbing alone and using the existing bolts and a self-administered belay system).

  One cannot help returning again to the lonely figure of Messner, climbing Everest without oxygen, alone and with no fixed ropes. His skinny, bearded presence, the stigmata of his frost-chewed extremities – his name Messner/Messiah – gives the clue to the prophetic Christ-like role he plays in high-altitude mountaineering. His visions and temptations are set down in his hallucinatory account of his solo climb of Everest – taking nothing with him, but abandoning a tent and other gear; at one point he loses his rucksack and cries because it has become, in the hypoxic state, a dear friend. Even the chosen one cannot help but discard things on the mountain.

  17

  Lost for Forty-Three Days

  You may find God searching for stones.

  Nepalese proverb

  Things are discarded or lost on the mountains. So are people. It’s very easy to get lost on a trail going downhill. When you go uphill, say through the rhododendrons and pines and other shrubs and bushes, you may come across forks in the trail, but if you take the wrong turn it will either converge or branch off considerably. This is a function of going up a mountain where the paths tend to converge. Going downhill, the opposite happens.

  It was the middle of November and the weather was still fine. I was coming down from the high hills, low by Himalayan standards – 3,500 metres, no more – above Yoksum, the old capital of Sikkim. I was descending with two Germans – Susanne and Mathias – and they were slightly ahead of me. The route was mainly very obvious – it was an ancient pilgrimage route made from compacted cobbles probably hundreds of years ago. Landslides and weather had taken their toll, so from time to time deep cuts in the sandy, rock-laden soil marked an alternative route. But it always joined back up with the original rocky trail.

  I needed to take a piss. I did not tell them, as it was faintly embarrassing to have them decide whether to wait or go on while I fumbled around in the bushes looking for cover. I thought I’d be quick and easily catch them up; Mathias had knee problems and wasn’t descending very rapidly.

  It was hard to find somewhere you couldn’t be seen from the path. There were Indians and Sikkimese using the path. I didn’t want to offend them. I roamed further through the undergrowth, past pines, prickly bushes, ferns. I found a hollow, took a piss, then, instead of heading back up to the path – which looked a tiring thing to do – I realised that as I was already below it I could keep going and rejoin it on the next of its snaky lower loops. The path went back and forth, winding in loops all the way down the mountain.

  Eager to catch up, I charged downhill. I had both my poles, which caught in the undergrowth, but I needed at least one to keep stable on the slippery surface, made up of leaves on earth. The altitude was getting lower – maybe about 3,500 metres now – and I was feeling better and fitter all the time. Even so, I was having a hard time picking my way over boulders and rotting tree trunks.

  I crossed a grassy area I didn’t remember. It was criss-crossed with indistinct, undecided scuffs of sandy earth. As if giant rabbits had been making tentative attempts at burrowing. Was this part of the path? I kept going to the edge of the grass and it was a sudden steep drop.

  I couldn’t see anyone at all.

  I had an urge to charge off to the left, but I’ve been lost before – on two occasions for an entire day – so I calmed down and tried to get a better sense of where I was. All I knew was that I had completely lost the path.

  I wasn’t in the high mountains on a proper climb, but paradoxically, there’s much less chance of getting lost on such an expedition. Mountaineers are not usually alone and they are above the snow line. Wearing brightly coloured clothes, as long as the visibility is good they stand out a mile off. Lower down, beneath tree cover, among boulders, rotting tree trunks and fast-flowing glacier-fed streams, it’s not so easy to be spotted.

  When you’re lost it all looks the same

  And such mixed terrain is, as I found, difficult enough under good conditions. But imagine a heavy fall of snow and snow still falling. These were the
conditions faced by James Scott, a twenty-two-year-old Australian trying to make his way back to a remote village in the Nepalese Himalayas. It was 22 December 1991 and the last hut he and his trek mate Mark had stayed at had just closed for the winter. It looked like snow, but the hut owner, a Nepali, had assured him it wouldn’t snow that day. It did, heavily.

  The two were trying to climb over a 4,600-metre pass – lower than the pass I had descended from that day – and down to another village. When the snow came, visibility shrank to less than ten metres. They seemed to be on the wrong side of a creek, according to the map. Snow was building up everywhere. Mark wanted to keep going, but James wanted to turn back. In such a situation you should always remain together and take the least risky option – which on the face of it was turning back. However, the situation was complicated by the usual circumstance in trekking – James and Mark had met only a few days earlier. Unlike climbing, where you are usually out with trusted fellow climbers, in trekking you may find yourself with a stranger; what is more, it is hard to verify their experience.

  Mark wanted to continue ascending and looking for the path. He said that they ought to keep going until 1 p.m. and then, if they still were lost, return. He calculated that they would need no more than a few hours to get back to the last village. James thought differently. He was already thinking about Kathmandu, where he wanted to put a call through to his fiancée in Australia. By leaving it until 1 p.m. he would be that much later in getting to Kathmandu. They took the fateful decision to split up. Just like in the horror movies, it always starts going wrong when the team decide to split up. Looked at coolly, Mark’s decision was the correct one if they intended to make it over the pass – he allowed for a cut-off which seemed safe. But James’s decision was the classical safe option: if in doubt, turn back. If the two had turned back, it would probably have been OK. But having split up, both were now at risk.

  Mark carried on climbing and found that they had indeed been way off course. At the top of the ridge where the pass lay, he was far to the west. However, he was able to make it across to the correct path and descend safely down the other side.

  All James had to do was backtrack. But descending a path obscured by snow is very hard. And all he had on his feet were training shoes – ‘sandshoes’, he called them; his boots had seemed too heavy and cumbersome. He didn’t have a cooker with him or any food. Only a sleeping bag, clothes, a water bottle and some medical supplies. James was a trainee doctor.

  Wearing light shoes isn’t really a problem in snow, as long as it isn’t deep and it isn’t steep. So up until it snowed the decision wasn’t a bad one – and if he had relied on instinct and not gone over the pass instead of following the hut owner’s exhortations that it wouldn’t snow, then he’d have been fine. But James also had the burden of being an extremely fit young man – he had done six years of karate – and so had a more relaxed view of any physical exertion he might have to make.

  It’s a paradox that the fitter and stronger you are, the more likely you are to have an accident. Your confidence carries you into places you aren’t prepared for, and it is lack of preparation that kills. James didn’t have a lighter or any matches. He had no survival skills, such as being able to make fire with a bow drill. He wasn’t a mountaineer and was unhappy with steep drops and exposed cliffs. What he did have was a strong faith in God and a fierce determination to survive.

  Floundering in the snow, he was soon soaked through. He down-climbed some hairy-looking cliffs trying to find his way back to the path. For a while he followed streams that plunged downhill. This works on the plains, but not in serious mountains. Streams always end up getting into gorges or plunging over steep cliffs. It’s much better to be out on a ridge when descending, where you can see some way ahead. Sure enough, James found his way blocked and had to backtrack. In the end, night fell and he had to sleep out under a large overhanging cliff face which was at least free of snow.

  The next day saw him getting more lost and desperate. Unless you have been trained to deal with being lost – which means having a plan to deal with being lost before it happens – it is very hard to resist going back and forth in a more and more chaotic fashion. People regularly die on the hills of Britain, not because of any particular difficulty or danger, but because they are sufficiently high and remote to engender panic. They make mistakes like setting down their pack to move faster, only to realise they can’t find their way back to their pack, leaving them lost and without resources.

  Having been very lost before – once in the Indonesian rainforest and once in the Canadian Rockies – mercifully, for only a day – I knew how to judge if the situation I was in was ‘serious’ or not. I thought not. The weather was fine – it wasn’t snowing or freezing, though at night the temperature had been – 15 degrees Celsius. I was on the broad face of a mountain – I hadn’t crossed any ravines or entered any new valleys. I knew that if I kept going downhill I would meet one of the several rivers I would have to cross. This river had a wire bridge, so all I would have to do is find the bridge to be back on course. I had waterproofs and a down jacket, water but no food.

  Wading through snow, James’s clothes were no longer frozen stiff; they soon reverted to being soaked. He was starting to get very cold. He spent another day floundering before he realised he would get hypothermia wandering around in such wet, cold conditions. He found another protected ledge which had an open area next to it. There were the remains of a campfire – years old, but still a first sign that other humans could at least reach this spot. And the open area would be visible to any helicopter, should it come searching. He decided to wait.

  He had two bars of chocolate and no water – he had lost his water bottle earlier in the day, scrambling over steep rocks. He ate the chocolate in two days.

  Meanwhile, the alert had been raised and his family had initiated a search for him. But they were handicapped by not really knowing what was going on. In the end, his sister Joanne flew to Kathmandu to try to find James.

  The main problems had been caused by misinformation. A group of hikers had claimed they had seen James – this sent the search party off in the wrong direction. When Joanne eventually confronted the group, it was clear they hadn’t been sure it was James. The hut owner claimed he hadn’t seen James or Mark. But later he agreed he had – again, after a wasted search in the wrong place. And the official who had debriefed Mark had misheard the last village they had left. The search needed to get back on track.

  The waiting and form-filling of embassies and official search parties didn’t seem to be working. Then Joanne began a random conversation with a Nepali taxi driver who turned out to be from the very region where James was lost. She had been told one area was impassable but the taxi driver assured her that it wasn’t. She now had a new area to search.

  Joanne was desperate. By chance she met an American woman with an interest in Buddhism, who told her of a Buddhist temple where the monks were able to predict the future. Joanne went there, but the main monk was busy. Instead, she met the smiling and reassuring Thrangu Rinpoche, a Buddhist lama who used a simple prayer ritual to enter a different mental state in order to gain an intuition about where James was. After a pause, he told Joanne to look in the same area that the taxi driver had suggested. Without prompting, he pointed to the map. Then he smiled and said she would meet James again. Joanne at least had something reassuring to go on.

  Back at the rock ledge, James had tried to break out. He managed a few hundred metres but had to turn back. He was resigned to waiting it out. He was able to melt snow in his sleeping-bag cover and then drink it. He also found that if he made a large snowball and left it in the sun (which appeared a week after the snowstorm ended), the interior turned to water and he could drink it without having to melt the snow in his mouth.

  He managed at long last to dry out his clothes, which meant he was warmer at night. The first few nights, despite his sleeping bag, he was intensely cold, fearing that he would die. Th
is was midwinter in the Himalayas – even in November walking around at 2,000 metres I have found it bitingly cold when in the shade, and at night it would be well below freezing.

  James took comfort, if that’s what it can be called, from the life and drawn-out death of Bobby Sands, who managed sixty-seven days without eating before he died. The alarming loss of body mass started to slow down. The first fourteen days saw the biggest amount of wasting away. He felt very weak and although his clothes were now dry, any excursion was very tiring. He realised he would either be rescued or die in this place. Not that he was scared of dying. A strong faith in God grew stronger. He prayed every night for everyone he could remember. While dreaming, he had conversations and encounters with his family and friends that seemed as if they were happening in real life; waking up on the narrow ledge was a terrible shock. At one point he was shocked by what sounded like a human howling. It was a bear. James was so hungry he believed he could kill the bear with his scissors. He shouted at the bear and it eyeballed him. Perhaps sensing his aggression, it backed away. Though he heard it howling again, it never tried to interfere with him. Unlike the crows who’d fly in every day to see whether he was still alive or not. James played dead and they got closer and closer. He tried to grab one but it was too fast. After that, they continued to check on him, but kept their distance. James tried eating various leaves and pine needles, but all seemed disgusting to him – and he didn’t know which ones were poisonous. A thin caterpillar came near – and he ate it immediately, enjoying the brief respite from hunger it provided.