by Bear Grylls
We huddled in the tent and waited. Waited for night to come.
CHAPTER 90
The thought of seventeen hours weighed down by those ruddy heavy oxygen tanks filled me with dread.
I could feel that slowly, methodically, my strength was deserting me.
I had no idea how I would lift the tanks on to my back – let alone carry them so far, and so high, through the waist-deep snow that lay ahead.
Instead, I tried to remind myself of all that lay on the other side.
Home, family, Shara. But they all felt so strangely distant.
I couldn’t picture them in my head. Oxygen deprivation does that. It robs you – of memory, of feeling, of power.
I tried to push negative thoughts from my mind.
To think of nothing but this mountain.
Just finish this, Bear, and finish strong.
The lethargy that you feel at this height is almost impossible to describe. You have nothing to drive you – and you just don’t care. All you want is to curl up in a ball and be alone.
It is why death can seem so strangely attractive – as if it is the only way to find blessed relief from the cold and pain.
That is the danger of the place.
I tried to sit up from where I lay. The zip of our porch was slightly broken. It fluttered half-closed.
From where I sat, I could see across the desolate col towards the start of the deep-snow face ahead. The mountain looked cold and menacing as the wind licked across the ice, picking up loose fragments of powdered snow and chasing them away.
I could see the route where Mick had fallen. He had been so lucky.
Or had he been protected? My mind swirled.
I thought of all those mountaineers who had lost their lives in pursuit of their summit dreams.
Was it worth it?
I could find no answer.
What I did know was that they had almost all died above the col.
7 p.m. Half an hour to go until we started the laborious task of getting kitted up again.
It would take us at least an hour.
By the end no part of our bodies or faces would be visible. We would be transformed into cocooned figures, huddled, awaiting our fate.
I reached into the top pouch of my backpack and pulled out a few crumpled pages wrapped in plastic. I had brought them just for this moment.
Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. But those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.
Isaiah 40:29–31.
I felt that this was all I really had up here. There’s no one else with enough extra strength to keep you safe. It really is just you and your Maker. No pretence, no fluff – no plan B.
Over the next twenty-four hours, there would be a one in six chance of dying. That focuses the mind. And the bigger picture becomes important.
It was time to look death in the eye. Time to acknowledge that fear, hold the hand of the Almighty, and climb on.
And those simple Bible verses would ring round my head for the next night and day, as we pushed on ever higher.
CHAPTER 91
We had decided to leave camp at 9 p.m. It was much earlier than climbers ever normally left for their summit bid.
Our forecast had promised strong winds higher up, which would increase during the day. We wanted to do as much of the climbing at night, before they got any worse.
Geoffrey, Alan and Michael soon also emerged from their tent, like astronauts preparing for a space walk. The Sherpa tent was still closed up. Neil roused them. They told us to go on. They would follow behind.
There was something mystical about the five of us moving across the col. Like soldiers wearily moving forward to battle.
As we reached the ice, the gradient steepened dramatically.
We bent lower into the face, our head torches darting around as they lit up the snow in front of our feet. Our world became that light: it showed us where to kick our crampons, where to place our ice axes.
The light was all we knew.
As time passed, the group naturally divided into two. Alan, Neil and I led the way – Geoffrey and Michael followed. They both soon fell way back.
After two hours, the three of us were perched on a small lip of ice. We looked down below.
‘Are you scared?’ Alan asked me quietly. They were the only words any of us had spoken so far.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘But not as scared as I’d be if I could see the angle of this face we’re on,’ I continued, with no trace of irony.
It was true. It was too dark to see the danger. All we could see was the intensity of the snow and ice, lit brightly by our head torches.
At midnight we came across deep powdery drift snow. We hadn’t expected this. It drained our reserves as we floundered about, attempting to wade up through it.
Each step we took, our feet would slide back. It took three steps just to make the ground of one. Snow filled my mask and gloves, and my goggles began to steam up. I swore under my breath.
Where the hell is the balcony? It’s got to be soon.
All I could see above was more ice and rock, disappearing into darkness. I was tiring.
At 1 a.m. we clambered over one more ledge and collapsed in the snow.
We were at the balcony. A sense of excitement filled my body. We were now twenty-seven-and-a-half thousand feet above sea level.
As I removed my mask in a bid to conserve oxygen, the thin air seemed to burn my lungs like frozen fire. Hellfire.
I sat back in the snow and closed my eyes.
We had to wait for the Sherpas, who were bringing the spare oxygen canisters, which we would swap with our half-empty ones. These fresh tanks should then last to the summit, and back to the balcony. It would give us around ten hours to complete the final ascent.
Time up here was all about oxygen – and oxygen at this height meant survival.
The temperature was minus forty degrees Fahrenheit.
At 2 a.m. there was still no sign of the Sherpas – and both Neil and I were beginning to get really, really cold. On such a small flow of oxygen, frostbite can creep up on you – silently and quickly.
Suddenly the entire sky lit up.
The mountains flashed as if in daylight and then disappeared again. Thunder then rippled through the valleys.
This shouldn’t be here, I thought.
Seconds later the sky flashed again. It was an electric storm moving up through the valleys.
If it reached us, though, it would be fatal. It would turn the mountain into a raging mass of snow and wind that would be impossible to endure.
Somewhere beneath us, Geoffrey and Michael were also fighting a battle.
And humans have a habit of losing any battles that they fight in Everest’s Death Zone.
CHAPTER 92
Geoffrey was having problems with his oxygen set.
The flow wasn’t running properly, and was choking him. He struggled on but soon had to acknowledge that it was futile. He turned around. His attempt was over.
Michael also decided to turn back. He was utterly spent. The beckoning storm was the final clincher. He had climbed all his life and he knew both his body’s limit and the mountain-weather rule. ‘If there is doubt, there is no doubt, you go down.’
They both slowly started to descend back to the col – as we waited.
At 3 a.m., shivering incessantly, and on the threshold of our ability to survive immobile much longer, we saw the torches of the Sherpas below.
We then struggled with ice-cold fingers to change our tanks. At base camp we had got the process down to a fine art. But up here, in the dark and sub-zero cold, it was a different game altogether.
I just couldn’t get the threads on the oxygen cylinder fittings lined up. Small, ice-choked screw threads, in the dark, in freezing sub-zero, make for a pig of a job.
I had
no choice but to remove my outer mitts to be able to get a better grip on the regulator.
My shivering was now totally uncontrollable, and I screwed the regulator’s screw threads on at an angle. It instantly jammed.
I swore out aloud.
Neil and Alan were ready by now. Neil knelt next to me, waiting. But Alan just got up and left, heading for the ridge.
I fumbled crazily.
Come on, you brute.
I felt the whole situation begin to slip away from me. We had come too far to fail now – too far.
‘Come on, Bear, bloody get it working.’ Neil stammered through his mask.
I knew I was holding him up, but it was jammed, and there was little I could do, except keep trying.
By now, Neil had lost all feeling in his feet completely. This was bad. He was getting more and more frostbitten with every minute we waited. Then suddenly I managed to get the thread loose. I lined it up carefully, and this time it fitted snug.
We were on our way.
One of the three Sherpas then suddenly stopped. Silently, he pointed at the sky and shook his head. He turned around and headed down without a word.
Everyone makes their own choices up there. And you live by those decisions.
The storm lingered to the east, and beneath us – still some way off.
Neil and I looked at each other, then turned and headed up on to the ridge.
It was just a relief to be moving again, and soon I found a renewed energy that I hadn’t felt in a long time.
I guess that deep down I knew that this was my time.
I steadily moved past Neil to help blaze a trail through the snow. The pace was keeping me warm. Neil’s head was low and his body seemed to ooze exhaustion – but I knew he wouldn’t stop.
After an hour on the ridge, we hit even more of this deep drift snow – again. The energy that I had felt before began to trickle from my limbs with every laboured breath and step.
I could see Alan up ahead, also floundering in the powder. He seemed to be making no progress. The face still soared away above – drift snow as far as I could see.
I hardly even noticed the views up here – of the entire Himalayas stretched below us, bathed in the pre-dawn glow.
My mind and focus were entirely directed on what my legs and arms were doing. Summoning up the resolve to heave each thigh out of the deep powder and throw it another step forward was all that mattered.
Keep moving. Fight. Just one more step.
Yet the South Summit never seemed to arrive.
I could steadily feel every ounce of energy being sucked from my body.
It was like climbing a mountain of waist-deep treacle, whilst giving someone a fireman’s carry, who, for good measure, was also trying to force a pair of frozen socks into your mouth. Nice.
Each time I forced myself to stand, I felt weaker. I knew that my strength was finite. And was diminishing fast.
My body desperately needed more oxygen, but all it had was the meagre two litres that trickled past my nostrils every minute.
It wasn’t enough – and my tank was getting lower by the second.
CHAPTER 93
Why is it that the finish line always tends to appear just after the point at which we most want to give up? Is it the universe’s way of reserving the best for those who can give the most?
What I do know, from nature, is that the dawn only appears after the darkest hour.
Finally, and still far above me, the South Summit was now discernible in the dawn light.
For the first time, I could almost taste the end.
Power began to build inside me: raw, irrefutable and overflowing.
My old friend, a fierce, deep-rooted resolve, that I had only known a few times in my life – mainly from key moments on SAS Selection – was flooding back with each step that I took in the deep snow.
I would beat this damned snow and mountain.
My old friend overcame all pain and cold and fear – and persevered.
A few hundred feet beneath the South Summit we found the ropes that had been put in during the team’s first summit attempt. They gave me a vague sense of comfort as I stooped and clipped in.
The South Summit is still some four hundred feet beneath the true summit, but it is a huge milestone in the pursuit of the top. I knew that if I could reach here, then for the first time, the roof of the world would be within my grasp.
Neil was soon close behind me again. Alan had already staggered over the lip and was hunched over, cowering from the wind, as he took a few minutes to regain some energy.
Ahead I could see the infamous final ridge stretching away towards the Hillary Step – the sheer ice wall that was the final gatekeeper to the true summit.
Sir Edmund Hillary, Everest’s first conqueror, once said that the mountains gave him strength. I’d never really understood this until now. But it was intoxicating.
Something deep inside me knew that I could do this.
The final ridge is only about four hundred feet along, but it snakes precariously along one of the most exposed stretches of mountain on this planet. On either side, down sheer faces, lies Tibet to the east, and Nepal to the west.
Shuffling along the knife-edge ridge, we moved ever onward, towards the Hillary Step.
This was all that then barred our way to the top.
The rope was being whipped out in a loop by the wind as I shuffled along.
I leant on my ice axe, against the low bank of snow down to my right, to steady myself.
Suddenly my ice axe shot straight through the white veneer, as part of the snow bank gave way beneath me.
I stumbled to regain my balance and move away from the collapse.
We were effectively shuffling along a ledge with little but frozen water beneath us. I could see down through the hole where the snow had been, to the distant rocky plains of Tibet below.
We kept moving. A step at a time.
Steadily. Slowly.
Ever closer.
Ever further away.
CHAPTER 94
Just under the South Summit I could make out the shape where Rob Hall lay. He had died up here some twenty-four months earlier.
His body, half covered in drift-snow, remained unchanged. Frozen in time. A stark reminder that those who survive the mountain do so because she allows you to.
But when she turns, she really turns.
And the further into her grasp you are, the greater the danger.
Right now, we were about as far into her grasp as it was possible to venture.
And I knew it.
Rob’s last words to his wife Jan had been: ‘Please don’t worry too much.’
They are desperate words from a mountaineer who bravely understood he was going to die.
I tried to shake his memory from my oxygen-starved brain. But I couldn’t.
Just get going, Bear. Get this done, then get down.
At the end of the ridge we leant on our ice axes and looked up.
Above us was the legendary Hillary Step, the forty-foot ice wall that formed one of the mountain’s most formidable hurdles.
Cowering from the wind, I tried to make out a route up it.
This ice face was to be our final and hardest test. The outcome would determine whether we would join those few who have touched that hallowed ground above.
If so, I would become only the thirty-first British climber ever to have done this.
The ranks were small.
I started up cautiously. It was a long way to come to fall here.
Points in. Ice axe in. Test them. Then move.
It was slow progress, but it was progress. And steadily I moved up the ice.
I had climbed steep pitches like this so many times before, but never twenty-nine thousand feet up in the sky. At this height, in this rarefied thin air, and with 40 m.p.h. of wind trying to blow us off the ice, I was struggling. Again.
I stopped and tried to steady myself.
Then
I made that old familiar mistake – I looked down.
Beneath me, either side of the ridge, the mountain dropped away into abysses.
Idiot, Bear.
I tried to refocus on only what was in front of me and above.
Up. Keep moving up.
So I kept climbing.
It was the climb of my life, and nothing was going to stop me.
CHAPTER 95
Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause. Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause.
It is unending.
I heave myself over the final lip, and strain to pull myself clear of the edge.
I clear the deep powder snow from in front of my face. I lie there hyperventilating.
Then I clear my mask of the ice that my breath has formed in the freezing air.
I unclip off the rope whilst still crouching. The line is now clear for Neil to follow up.
I get to my feet and start staggering onwards.
I can see this distant cluster of prayer flags, semi-submerged in the snow. Gently flapping in the wind, I know that these flags mark the true summit – the place of dreams.
I feel this sudden surge of energy beginning to rise within me.
It is adrenalin coursing around my veins and muscles.
I have never felt so strong – and yet so weak – all at the same time.
Intermittent waves of adrenalin and fatigue come and go, as my body struggles to sustain the intensity of these final moments.
I find it strangely ironic that the very last part of this immense climb is so gentle a slope.
A sweeping curve – curling along the crest of the ridge towards the summit.
Thank God.
It feels like the mountain is beckoning me up. For the first time, willing me to climb up on to the roof of the world.
I try to count the steps as I move, but my counting becomes confused.
I am now breathing and gasping like a wild animal in an attempt to devour the oxygen that seeps into my mask.