Mud, Sweat and Tears

by Bear Grylls

But I knew that the serac would also offer some protection from avalanches above.

  The tents were flapping in the now-stronger wind – alluring yet so elusive – and the cold had set in ready for the coming night.

  It was now also snowing hard and the light was fading fast.

  The wind swept the snow across the dark ice and up into our bodies.

  Mick was a little behind Neil and me, and as we both rolled over the ledge of camp three we looked down to see him stationary. Another weary step, then another rest.

  Eventually he staggered on to the ledge.

  A cold smile swept across his half-obscured face.

  We were at camp three.

  Alive and together.

  CHAPTER 83

  The headache that I had hoped I had left behind at camp two was with me again – but stronger now.

  I swallowed an aspirin without letting anyone see. For the first time I didn’t want the others to think I might be suffering. Not at this decision-point stage.

  The tent we were in was better suited to one man with a minimum of kit, rather than three bodies, booted and spurred against the coldest, windiest place on earth.

  Such close quarters require a huge degree of tolerance, when you are tired and thirsty, with a splitting headache – either huddled over a stove melting ice, or cramped against the cold ice wall next to the tent.

  It was at this sort of time that having good friends with you really mattered.

  Good friends who you can rely on – the sort of people who smile when it is grim.

  If ever friendships were to be tested and forged, it was now.

  Quietly, we got on and did all the necessary chores that living at such extreme altitude entails.

  Once your outer boots were off you didn’t leave the tent. Several lives had been lost because climbers had gone outside their tents wearing only their inner boots.

  One small, altitude-induced slip on the blue ice had been their last conscious act before finding themselves hurtling down the five-thousand-foot glassy face to their deaths.

  Instead, you peed in your pee-bottle, which you then held tight against your chest for warmth.

  And as for pooing – always a nightmare – that involved half an hour of getting everyone to move over so you could get re-dressed, before putting your crampons and boots back on, to venture outside.

  Then you would squat, butt out from the face, hold on to a sling and ice screw, pull your trousers down, lean out and aim.

  Oh, and make sure there were no other climbers coming up from below.

  When dawn finally arrived and I manoeuvred myself from the tent, the fresh crisp air filled my nostrils. The heavy snow and driving wind of the previous day had been replaced by this beautiful stillness.

  I just stared in awe as I waited for the others to get ready. I felt like I was looking down on half the world.

  Those few minutes that I sat there, as Mick and Neil got ready, I experienced a stillness that I did not think existed.

  Time seemed to stand still, and I did not want the moment to end.

  The ice face dropped away before me to the vast valley of white beneath, and the whole range of Himalayan peaks stretched away in the distance to our west.

  This really was a land apart.

  We were now almost two vertical miles above base camp. Mountains that had once towered above us were now level or below. What a sight – what a privilege – to enjoy and soak in!

  But today we would undo all that slog once more, as we descended back down to lower altitudes again.

  As I looked back down the valley, I registered the severity of the face we had climbed up in the wind and snow only twelve hours earlier. I re-checked my harness as I sat there.

  Soon we were ready and we started down.

  The rope ran through my rappelling device and buzzed as I picked up speed. It was intoxicating bouncing down the ice face. My figure of eight rappelling device was warm to the touch as the rope raced through it.

  This was the mountain at her best.

  I tried not to think of the thousands of feet of sweat and toil that were flying through my hands. I did not want to remind myself that I would have to do it again on the way up to camp four and the summit.

  The prospect hurt too much.

  For now, I was content to have survived camp three; to have proved that my body could cope above twenty-four thousand feet, and to be on my way back to base in good weather.

  Back at camp two the tension fell away. We were ecstatic.

  The next day we left for base camp, crossing the crevasses with renewed confidence.

  Our final acclimatization climb was over.

  We were now receiving daily very accurate weather reports from the Bracknell Weather Centre in the UK. These gave us the most advanced precision forecast available anywhere in the world. The meteorologists were able to determine wind strengths to within five knots accuracy at every thousand foot of altitude.

  Our lives would depend on these forecasts back up the mountain.

  Each morning, the entire team would crowd eagerly around the laptop to see what the skies were bringing – but it did not look good.

  Those early signs of the monsoon arriving in the Himalayas, the time when the strong winds over Everest’s summit begin to rise, didn’t seem to be coming.

  All we could do was wait.

  Our tents were very much now home to us at base camp. We had all our letters and little reminders from our families.

  I had a seashell I had taken from a beach on the Isle of Wight, in which Shara had written my favourite verse – one I had depended on so much through the military.

  ‘Be sure of this, that I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth.’ Matthew 28:20.

  I reread it every night at base camp before I went to sleep.

  There was no shame in needing any help up here.

  CHAPTER 84

  I woke up very suddenly, feeling violently sick. I crawled to the door of my tent and threw up all over the ice and rock outside.

  I felt like death and my head was throbbing.

  Shit. This didn’t bode well, and I knew it.

  I lay curled in a ball in my tent throughout the heat of the day at base camp. I didn’t know what to feel.

  Andy, our team doctor, told me I was run down and had also got a chronic chest infection. He gave me a course of antibiotics and said I needed to rest.

  I just needed some time to recover. Time that we didn’t have.

  Later that day, my greatest fear came to pass when Henry entered the mess tent with the latest forecast.

  ‘Good news, the wind’s beginning to rise. Looks as though we’re going to get the break around the nineteenth. Right, that gives us five days to get up to camp four at the col and be ready in position for a summit bid. We need to start working towards this at once – and that means now.’

  The moment I had longed for was suddenly the moment I most dreaded.

  Finally it had come, but at what a time – when I was sprawled out, unable to move.

  I cursed myself as my body shivered and my joints ached with fever. There was no way I was going to be able to climb – and seventeen and a half thousand feet up is a nightmare of a place to recover.

  Mick, Neil, Karla and Alan were to leave base camp at dawn the next morning. Michael, Graham and Geoffrey would form a second wave, scheduled to leave a day later – weather permitting.

  As for me, I kept throwing up all day. I was drained and pale. My Everest dream lay in a pool of vomit outside my tent.

  I had given my everything for this chance at the top – and now all I could do was sit and watch it slipping away.

  Please, God, help me get better – and fast.

  That night was probably the longest and loneliest of the expedition.

  I was dry, I was safe, I was near my friends – but I just felt desperate. And alone.

  An opportunity lost.

  In a matter of hours, Neil, Mick, Karl
a and Alan would leave base camp for the first summit attempt on Everest’s south side for over six months – and I would not be part of it.

  Graham and Michael were both also sick – coughing, spluttering, run down and weak.

  Henry had insisted that Geoffrey wait to be part of a second team. Four and four was safer than five and three. Nobly, he had agreed.

  The four of us would form a pretty mediocre-looking reserve summit party – that’s if there was going to be a chance for a second summit team.

  I doubted there would.

  At 5 a.m., I heard the first rustles from Mick’s tent – but this morning things were different. There was no banter. Neil and Mick whispered to each other as they put on their harnesses in the cold air of dawn.

  They didn’t want to wake us. But I hadn’t even come close to sleep.

  The pair would want to get moving soon. They both crouched outside my tent to say goodbye. Mick shook my hand and held it.

  ‘You’ve been such a backbone to this team, Bear. Just hang on in there and get strong again. Your chance will come, buddy.’

  I smiled. I so envied them – their timing, their opportunity – and their health.

  At 5.35 a.m. the four of them, along with Pasang, left base camp. I could hear their boots crunching purposefully across the rocks towards the foot of the icefall.

  My tent had never felt so quiet – and so bleak.

  Two days later, as the guys started to head up towards camp three, I woke feeling much stronger. Against all the odds. Not 100 per cent but definitely halfway there.

  That was good enough for me. The antibiotics were kicking in.

  That morning, though, the forecast that came in had changed – dramatically and very suddenly. Everest has a habit of doing this.

  ‘Severe warning: Tropical cyclone forming south of Everest. Likely to turn into a typhoon as it approaches the mountain.’

  The typhoon was due in two days – that didn’t give the guys much time up there.

  It would not only bring gale-force winds, it could also potentially drop up to five feet of snow in a matter of hours. Anyone still up there in that would – in Henry’s words – ‘become unreachable’.

  That afternoon, I went to Henry with a suggestion.

  Michael and Graham were still ill. But I was feeling almost fit again.

  ‘Why not let Geoffrey and me head up to camp two, so we can be in position just in case the typhoon heads away?’

  It was a long shot – a very long shot – but as the golfer Jack Nicklaus once said: ‘Never up, never in.’

  Sure as hell, I wasn’t going to stand any chance of the summit, sitting here at base camp twiddling my thumbs, waiting.

  In addition, at camp two, I could be a radio go-between from base camp (where Henry was) and the team higher up.

  That was the clincher.

  Henry knew that Michael and Graham weren’t likely to recover any time soon. He understood my hunger, and he recognized the same fire that he had possessed in his own younger days.

  His own mountaineering maxim was: ‘Ninety-nine per cent cautiousness; 1 per cent recklessness.’

  But knowing when to use that 1 per cent is the mountaineer’s real skill.

  I stifled a cough, and left his tent grinning.

  I was going up.

  CHAPTER 85

  Geoffrey and I were steadily approaching the lip at the top of the icefall. I clipped my karabiner into the last rope between us and camp one. It was 7.20 a.m.

  We took most of the day to reach camp two in the distance, eventually arriving at 3.30 p.m.

  I felt drained and dizzy.

  Fifty per cent fit is hard to climb on, especially at this altitude, but I wasn’t going to share that feeling with anyone. There was too much at stake now.

  Geoffrey and I sat and drank with our backpacks at our feet, our wind suits open to the waist to let the cool breeze dry our sweat. The two Sherpas up at camp two, Ang-Sering and my friend, Thengba, plied us with hot lemon.

  It was good to have made it up here.

  I knew that Mick and Neil and the others would be somewhere between camp three and camp four by now. They would be breaking into new territory, going higher than at any point so far on the expedition.

  We had studied the route in detail.

  It was a treacherous traverse across the Lhotse Face, and a long haul up what is known as the Geneva Spur – a steep band of jutted rock that pokes out from the blue ice. This spur then leads to the windswept, desolate saddle known as the South Col, the site of our high camp – camp four.

  The Sherpas pointed out the climbers through binoculars. They were dots on a vast canvas of white far above us.

  Go, Mick – go, buddy. I smiled to myself.

  It was 11 p.m. Mick and Neil would be leaving camp four any minute now. They would be going through the ritual of getting rebooted, checking gear, checking oxygen, and tightening crampons.

  Not an easy task for four people in a tiny tent at twenty-six thousand feet – in the dark.

  The full moon had been on the 11 May, the ideal summit time. By now, though, over a week later, that moon was fading.

  It meant they would need the light from their head torches on all the time – but batteries don’t last long in those sub-zero conditions. Extra batteries mean extra weight. And changing batteries in minus thirty-five degrees, with thick down mittens on, is harder than you think.

  I had never wanted to be beside my best buddy Mick so much as I did right now.

  The jet-stream winds were silent; the night was still, and they left camp in good time, ahead of the two other teams up there. It was a good decision.

  Mick describes feeling unsure about his oxygen supply from early on after leaving the col. It was a hunch. It was almost prophetic.

  Five hours later the trail of climbers was snaking its way un-roped up the ice and deep snow towards what is nonchalantly known as the ‘balcony’ ledge at twenty-seven and a half thousand feet.

  The team were moving slower than expected. Mick’s head torch had failed. Changing batteries had proved too hard in the darkness and deep snow.

  The weather that had looked so promising was now turning.

  Mick and Neil still pushed on. Karla and Alan were behind them, moving slowly – but continuing.

  Eventually, at 10.05 a.m., Neil and Pasang reached the South Summit. Neil could see the final ridge that led to the infamous snow and ice couloir called the ‘Hillary Step’ – and above this the gentle slope that ran four hundred feet to the true summit.

  In 1996 the disasters on the mountain had robbed Neil of the chance to go above camp four. Two years on he was here again – only this time the summit was within his reach.

  He felt strong, and waited anxiously for Mick to arrive. They would need to be together to manage the last ridge and the Hillary Step.

  Something told Neil that things were not going right.

  As the precious minutes slipped by, as he waited for Mick and the others to reach him, he sensed that the dream that had eluded him once was going to do so again.

  Somewhere along the way, there had been a misunderstanding between the climbers over who had what rope. It happens at high altitude. It is a simple mistake.

  But mistakes have consequences.

  Suddenly, here, at four hundred feet beneath the summit of Mount Everest, it dawned on them all that they had run out of rope. They would have no choice now but to retreat. Continuing was not even an option.

  Neil stared through his goggles at the summit: so close, yet so very far. All he felt was emptiness.

  He turned, and never looked back.

  At 10.50 a.m., the radio flared into life. It was Mick’s voice. He sounded weak and distant.

  ‘Bear. This is Mick. Do you copy?’

  The message then crackled with intermittent static. All I could make out was something about oxygen.

  I knew it was bad news.

  ‘Mick, say that again. What about yo
ur oxygen, over?’

  There was a short pause.

  ‘I’ve run out. I haven’t got any.’

  The words hung in the quiet of the tent at camp two.

  Through eyes squeezed shut, all I could think was that my best friend would soon be dying some six thousand feet above me – and I was powerless to help.

  ‘Keep talking to me, Mick. Don’t stop,’ I said firmly. ‘Who is with you?’

  I knew if Mick stopped talking and didn’t find help, he would never survive. First he would lose the strength to stand, and with it the ability to stave off the cold.

  Immobile, hypothermic and oxygen starved, he would soon lose consciousness. Death would inevitably follow.

  ‘Alan’s here.’ He paused. ‘He’s got no oxygen either. It’s … it’s not good, Bear.’

  I knew that we had to contact Neil, and fast. Their survival depended on there being someone else above them.

  Mick came back on the net: ‘Bear, I reckon Alan only has ten minutes to live. I don’t know what to do.’

  I tried to get him back on the radio but no reply came.

  CHAPTER 86

  Eventually, two Swedish climbers and a Sherpa called Babu Chiri found Mick. By chance – by God’s grace – Babu was carrying a spare canister of oxygen.

  Neil and Pasang had also now descended, and met up with Mick and the others. Neil then located an emergency cache of oxygen half-buried in the snow nearby. He gave one to Alan, and forced both him and Mick to their feet.

  Slow and tired, his mind wandering in and out of consciousness, Mick remembers little about the next few hours. It was just a haze of delirium, fatigue, and cold.

  Descending blue sheet ice can be lethal. Much more so than ascending it. Mick staggered on down, the debilitating effects of thin air threatening to overwhelm him.

  Somewhere beneath the balcony Mick suddenly felt the ground surge beneath him. There was a rush of acceleration as the loose topping of snow – covering the blue ice – slid away under him.