He found himself covered over in ice crystals as he pulled himself out to look for Ian. But Ian had not got back in time – he had been caught in the full force of the avalanche and had been swept down to his death. Down below, there had been a group of Sherpas coming back to pick up some loads from Camp II. Miraculously they had not been engulfed by the avalanche, and for a few minutes they all stood stunned with the shock, before starting to hunt through the debris. They finally found Ian’s body – he must have been killed outright.
And so, suddenly, in that moment of joyous victory, this tragedy had struck us. We had lost a close friend and one of the kindest, least personally motivated people that I have ever known. Ian spent much of his time repairing fixed ropes or giving the Sherpas that little bit of help and instruction. I think he was genuinely loved by the Sherpas and he was certainly the one person in the team for whom no one ever had a bad word. It seemed bitterly ironic that the person in the team who was, perhaps, the most safety-conscious should have been caught out by this cruel act of fate.
We took Ian’s body down to Base Camp and we buried him in sight of the mountain he had given so much to climb. It was Tukte Sherpa, our cook, who suggested the burial place. We had been looking round for a suitable place – a place which would be above any floods, and where Ian’s body could rest securely and safely. Tukte pointed to a little knoll, immediately below a rocky slab where Ian had spent many of his rest periods, teaching the Sherpas the various techniques they would need for their safety on the mountain. Tukte said, ‘This would be a good place for him to lie.’ We dug the grave and all the Sherpas – even the porters who had come up to help carry our gear – were scattered all over the hillside, picking the short blue Alpine flowers to make wreaths. And then we carried Ian’s body up to the grave. Standing there at its foot, I tried to say something that was remotely adequate, and at the same time to control my own emotion; and all I could say was, ‘He was a fine mountaineer and a very safe one – but most important of all, he was the kindest, the most unselfish and, I think, the most universally-liked person that I have ever known.’
After this Tom Frost said a short Mormon prayer, while I think most of us were either crying or doing our best to hold back the tears.
Inevitably, the question arises – ‘Was it worth it?’ Was a successful climb worth a man’s life – especially a man who was a close friend, who left a wife and a young child? But this is a question which has got to be faced and answered by all of us who climb, or base our lives round the mountains, because Ian’s accident could have happened to any member of the team – could happen to any one of us, anywhere in our climbing lives – in Britain – in the Alps or the further ranges of the earth. This was brought home even more forcibly, because just before Ian’s tragic death, we had received the news that Tom Patey, one of my closest friends, and certainly the richest, most wonderful personality that the mountains had produced since the war, had died in one of those inexplicable abseiling accidents – in this case on a sea-stack on the north coast of Scotland. His tragedy and that of his wife Betty, and his children, was as great as that of Ian, and all of us who go climbing must realise that we, also, could be killed by an accident over which we seem to have very little control. It is a cruel and difficult responsibility, particularly when we have wives and children whom we love. But once the mountains have bitten into us, we know, and the wives who love us know, that we could never give them up. All we can do is to try to be as careful as we possibly can, and pray that luck will remain with us.
– CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO –
WHAT NEXT?
The grass of the lower moraines was a lush green and alpine flowers in pink, white and purple could be glimpsed from amongst their long blades. The rock was warm to the touch, the air balmy; and we were walking away from Annapurna, whose South Face had held the focus of our strength, effort and expectation for these last eight weeks. There was a strange mixture of exultation and sorrow; an exultation born from the closeness of unity that we, as an expedition, had achieved, and sorrow at the death of Ian Clough, a death which seemed the more cruel because it had occurred at the very last moment of possible danger, when he was on his way down after the final victory.
Before Annapurna, Jimmy Roberts and Norman Dyhrenfurth, joint leaders of the proposed International Everest Expedition, had invited me to join them as climbing leader of their face party. At first it had seemed too good an opportunity to miss, but on the way back from the mountain I realised, with increasing force, that I could not go through with another major expedition the following spring. Annapurna South Face had drained my reserves of nervous energy. The responsibility and the work involved in the organisation, the leading of the expedition on the mountain, and now the prospect of closing it down and writing the expedition book, had been like a long, unending marathon. I knew instinctively that I needed at least a year to recover my equilibrium and rebuild any enthusiasm for the expedition game. I do not think Ian’s death affected my decision. However great the sorrow at the loss of a close friend, I realised that this is the price you must be prepared to pay if you go climbing; you minimise risk where possible, calculate the odds and turn back if the odds seem to be against you. But sometimes, however careful you are, and Ian had been the most careful of climbers, the fact that you have spent long periods exposed to risk can catch up with you.
On our return to Kathmandu, I broke the news to Jimmy Roberts of my withdrawal from the International Everest Expedition; Jimmy runs a trekking business there. He took my decision wonderfully well and was very sympathetic. He had already decided to invite Don Whillans and Dougal Haston to join the expedition, and the three of them began planning the next year’s trip, talking with the Japanese climbers who were on their way back from an unsuccessful attempt on the South-West Face of Everest. They had made a reconnaissance in the autumn of 1969, reaching a height of 26,000 feet on the face, just below the rock wall that stretches across it barring the way to the summit rocks. That spring they had failed to reach a point as high as on their autumn reconnaissance. The face had been unusually bare of snow and as a result had been swept by stone-fall. They had had difficulty in finding ledges for their camps and finally had abandoned the attempt in favour of ensuring at least a limited success, by putting the first Japanese on the summit of Everest by the South Col route.
At this point I felt no regrets about my decision to withdraw from the expedition; I just wanted to get home to Wendy, get the book written and close down our own expedition. But by the time I had reached England a few doubts began to crystallise – had I turned down the opportunity of a lifetime? These doubts came to a head when Jimmy Roberts, on a short holiday in England, came to ask my advice about equipment for the expedition. It was too much! Impulsively, I asked him if he would have me back in the team; he accepted immediately and a few days later I had a warm, friendly letter from Norman Dyhrenfurth, welcoming me aboard. But in that period I had taken yet another back flip. My change of mind had been dictated on emotional grounds, of not wanting to be left out – but now, having decided to rejoin the expedition, I began to think again of all that it implied.
The job of climbing leader could be an invidious one. I hadn’t chosen the team, wondered what level of loyalty climbers from France, Austria, Germany and the United States would feel to someone they knew only by reputation. I was so involved in getting Annapurna South Face written that I could have done little or no work for the expedition in the preparatory stage. I found myself wondering how effectively it would be possible to take over a position of responsibility on the climb itself, having contributed nothing to the preparations, and knowing very little about the equipment which was going to be used. Another very real worry was the financial backing of the expedition. Norman Dyhrenfurth and Jimmy Roberts had taken a very courageous step in launching a massive and very expensive expedition without any kind of sponsor to back them if they failed to raise sufficient funds. On Annapurna I had had none of these worries, since
we had been fully backed by the Mount Everest Foundation. As a member of the International Expedition, however, I felt that I would have a financial responsibility towards it, but very little control over whether the expedition went into the red. Obviously, I was going to become heavily involved in fund-raising for the expedition, since Dyhrenfurth, at that stage, was having considerable trouble with the finances.
Perhaps all this sounds a long way from the simple romance of climbing a mountain. I know that it was something which did not worry either Don or Dougal – they simply wanted to go and climb Everest, and were probably fortunate in that no one expected them to become involved in the organisation of the expedition. Because of the experience I had gained in the field of journalism and in expedition organisation, it was inevitable that I should become more heavily involved. The more I examined it, the more frightened I became of that involvement.
Obviously, there were going to be problems in making the team cohesive on the expedition itself. There would be problems in raising the money, in getting the equipment together for a team scattered throughout the world, and I was tired from a year of such exceedingly exacting, nerve-racking work. I rocked back and forth for three days, tossing the conflicting motives and problems from side to side, and then I finally decided – I could not face the prospect of another big, complicated expedition. I resigned yet again.
In the midst of all this indecision I was under heavy pressure, anyway, while writing Annapurna South Face. I have no doubt at all that, had I not gone to Annapurna, I would have stayed in the International Everest Expedition, even though I, as did many of the other members, foresaw many of the problems which were likely to arise.
But still I had not escaped from Everest. Some weeks after my withdrawal, the BBC, who had bought television and feature rights in the expedition, approached me to go out as their reporter. There is no doubt that this was a magnificent professional opportunity for me, in my role as photo-journalist, yet I felt I could not take it. My reasons, I suspect, were part egotistical, part genuine worry about the structure of the expedition and, over all, a total mental fatigue. Having just finished writing the story of one expedition – how on earth could I summon the fresh enthusiasm needed to write about another?
On the egotistical level, I had known the satisfaction of having the ultimate responsibility; it would have been difficult to have gone back to being an observer and, in the final analysis, it would have been difficult for me to have accepted the role of climbing leader, even though I respected both Jimmy Roberts and Norman Dyhrenfurth.
As the new year of 1971 came in, my own book finished, my batteries of energy recharged, I began to have many doubts about my withdrawal from the expedition. I became insufferable to live with, as I reproached myself over and over again for what seemed a failure to snatch the opportunity which had been offered.
I followed the fortunes of the expedition with mixed emotions, and have to confess I was even almost relieved that my own fears were proved justified. The South-West Face remained unclimbed. By this time I had resolved to try to organise an expedition of my own; the first problem, however, was to gain permission for the climb, and the mountain was fully booked for the next five years. Dr Karl Herrligkoffer, a German climber who had led a series of highly controversial expeditions to Nanga Parbat, had permission to attempt the Face in the spring of 1972. He had already invited Dougal Haston and Don Whillans to join his expedition. He also invited Jimmy Roberts, who declined the invitation.
It was rumoured that the Japanese had permission to try the Face next, if Herrligkoffer failed, and so that summer of 1971 it seemed very unlikely that I should ever get the chance of going for the South-West Face of Everest. Then, in the autumn of 1971, I received a letter from Dougal. He told me that Herrligkoffer wanted to increase the size of the British team, mainly as a means of tapping more funds, since he was having trouble in raising sufficient money in Germany. Dougal, having suggested my name to Herrligkoffer, asked me if I would like to join them.
At this stage I was trying to organise a small expedition with Joe Brown, Hamish Mclnnes, Martin Boysen, Paul Nunn and Will Barker, to the Trango Tower, a magnificent granite monolith in the Baltoro Glacier. From photographs it looked like the Old Man of Hoy, but was ten times as big. This would have been a perfect expedition, with magnificent rock-climbing and none of the problems associated with altitude (for it was only 20,000 feet high). With a small party of friends there would have been few worries about personality conflict. Our only problem was in getting permission from the Pakistan Government. When Dougal invited me to join the Herrligkoffer expedition there still seemed to be a chance that we might get permission for the Trango Tower, and so I declined his invitation with very few regrets: Herrligkoffer’s expedition seemed to be fraught with even more pitfalls than those of the International Everest Expedition.
But we did not gain permission for the Trango Tower. I was in a vacuum once again and could not resist the temptation of writing to Herrligkoffer to ask whether I could accept his invitation after all. He agreed to my joining as one of the four British members. Don and Dougal were already in the team so that left one more representative from this country to be invited. I phoned Don to find out whom he thought should join us, and was gratified that, in his own mind, he had settled on the same person that I had mentally selected – Doug Scott. Doug was a climber who had always been on the outside of the mainstream British climbing scene but who, in the last few years, had completed a large number of very impressive new routes in north-west Scotland. He was essentially an innovator, having adapted himself to the American style of Big Wall climbing, being one of the Britons to have climbed successfully in Yosemite. He also had behind him a long record of small expeditions to out-of-the-way places. A school teacher by profession, he had devoted himself to climbing to a degree equalled by very few people I know. His powerful physique and big set of lungs are attributes useful for any Everest climber.
Back in the Everest stakes, the more I learned about Herrligkoffer’s arrangements the less happy I became. It was now January 1972, but he did not yet appear to have any oxygen equipment at all, seemed to have made few arrangements in Nepal and, above all, was unbelievably secretive about his plans and organisation.
I had resolved that I would avoid getting involved in the preparations for the expedition and therefore went off to Chamonix to climb with Dougal. We were going to attempt a new route on the North Face of the Grandes Jorasses. We spent twelve days on the face – twelve glorious days, when the problems of life were reduced to a few feet of ice in front of our noses, trying to hack a platform for a bivouac in ice that was frozen as hard as the rocks it covered, of trying to survive the fury of a winter storm. We did not get up, but it didn’t seem to matter – the experience had been well worthwhile, for we had had twelve days of real climbing, uncluttered by politics and commercial pressures. During this climb, I have a feeling that both of us, separately, without discussing it, had decided to withdraw from the Herrligkoffer expedition. And so, once again I was out of Everest!
I was, nevertheless, still trying to get permission to attempt the South-West Face. It seemed unlikely that Herrligkoffer could possibly succeed. From what I had gathered, his gear was inadequate, he had postponed engaging his Sherpas to the last minute, and there seemed to be all the risks of a bi-national expedition which could be even greater than in an international one. With two clearly divided groups, each loyal to themselves, rather than the concept of the expedition as a whole, there seemed to be small chance of success.
And so I continued to manoeuvre for a chance of going to Everest. I received an immense amount of help from Mike Cheney, Jimmy Roberts’ assistant, who kept his ear close to the ground in Kathmandu, and acted as my representative.
At last, a chance began to materialise. An Italian millionaire, Signor Monzino, had permission for an autumn reconnaissance in 1972 to be followed by a spring attempt in 1973. Owing to sickness he gave up his autumn slot. Mi
ke Cheney informed me, and I applied for it immediately. There followed months of waiting – we still did not have permission from the Nepalese authorities – Herrligkoffer might still climb the South-West Face. Even if he failed, I could not help worrying about our prospects for raising, in the seven or eight weeks before our departure, the £60,000 I estimated the expedition would cost, at the same time as assembling all the gear and food.
On top of this were the problems of the autumn season. No expedition had succeeded in climbing Everest during the post-monsoon period, although two have tried and failed, beaten by the appalling winds and the cold which is experienced during the autumn.
The entire prospect seemed too far-fetched, but then I conceived a compromise solution. Why not have a mini-expedition to Everest – just four climbers and a few Sherpas? It was an exciting, refreshing prospect. In addition, it would be comparatively easy to organise and would not demand a vast budget. I asked Dougal Haston, Mick Burke and Nick Estcourt whether they would like to come along, and they all agreed. It became obvious that we should need some support and so I asked Peter Steele, who had been a member of the International Expedition, to come along as doctor, together with Mike Thompson to be our Base Camp Manager.
The expedition was planned before we learned of the failure of Herrligkoffer’s expedition. I heard the news in late May – and then the temptation built up. The South-West Face was still unclimbed!
The Next Horizon Page 35