by Michael Gill
Rising magnificently as a backdrop to the town was their first objective, Nilkantha, only nine kilometres to the west, a spectacular pyramid framed by the dark walls of its gorge. For a fortnight they skirmished around its base searching for a feasible route, but like other parties before them they found none. The weather was indifferent, snowfalls heavy, and the altitude more enervating than they could have imagined. Ed’s diary over the next two weeks records the Himalayan reality they were now facing: ‘Country very steep … Nilkantha looks terrific and our hopes have sunk rather low … None of us going well … We are quite obviously not acclimatized to this height – have no energy or drive and at times breathe with difficulty … Killed a sheep.’15 On 24 June they gave up and returned to Badrinath to lick their wounds and hope that Mukut Parbat would be easier.
Three days later they set off up a trail which would have taken them over the 18,400ft Mana Pass into Tibet had they persevered, but they turned right to gain the Chamrao Glacier leading to Mukut Parbat. Earle wrote, ‘A fine array of ice peaks was to be seen gleaming in the sun at the head of the various branches of the Chamrao Glacier. One big rocky mass dominated everything else – Mukut Parbat. It was exciting to find that our objective was such a fine looking peak.’16
Over the next 10 days, with the two Eds and George doing most of the work, they found a route up relatively easy glacier and rock to a col from which an apparently climbable ridge of snow and ice led to the summit of their peak. The terrain might not have been difficult, but this was a Himalayan mountain with its ever-present difficulties of altitude and freezing winds. On one day the two Eds and George climbed a virgin peak of 20,330ft. ‘Our first 20,000 footer!’ exulted Ed in his diary. ‘I was going better than the others and did a good deal of the trail-breaking.’17
On 10 July they moved into their Camp 3 at 21,000ft, and on 11 July they set off on their summit attempt, Ed Hillary and George on one rope; Earle, Ed Cotter and Pasang on the other. It was a bitterly cold day. On the crest of the ridge, where their route lay, a gale-force wind swept across from the south, penetrating the marrow of their bones. The inadequacies of their plain New Zealand boots became painfully apparent, particularly for George whose nailed soles conducted out whatever warmth he had in his feet. The others at least had Vibram rubber soles. During the four hours it took to reach the halfway point on their ridge, a subsidiary summit at 22,500ft, Ed Hillary and George stopped three times to remove their boots and massage circulation back into their frozen feet.
For the first half hour Hillary and Lowe were in the lead, but when the other three caught up Earle Riddiford politely asked if he could take the lead. George Lowe wrote:
We followed slowly … the wind shrieked and rocked us … the rope between us billowing out over Tibet … Earle and the others were in a little hollow cutting away slowly at some green ice … we waited and gradually froze. Ahead was a steep rib of snow and ice that curled over in a cornice. The side we had to climb was sheathed in hard ice. Big Ed and I reckoned it would take 3 or 4 hours to cut up this, and the chances of getting to the top were almost nil …18
Ahead of them Riddiford was by no means confident either, but he knew that this was the climb on which the success of the expedition would be judged. It was still only midday and he was not ready to give up yet. Nor was Pasang, who surprised the other two by saying, ‘Very little time to top, long way come, two hours to top.’ Riddiford wrote:
Actually it took six slogging hours, battling with the wind all the time … it was possible to avoid the worst of … the green ice by a delicate traverse up the crest of the ridge with one cramponed foot in Tibet and the other in Garhwal. Ahead was a series of bumps of mixed ice and rock, perhaps two hours, but both Cotter and Pasang were keen, and we went on …
We were beginning to get very tired … We struck soft snow. The wind, now much stronger, was direct in our faces and made each step in the soft snow a stagger. We didn’t know whether we could make it but managed to push on slowly up the final snow slope to the summit. It was a moment of exhilaration. We closed up and shook hands. Below us the great blue Tibetan glacier flowed away to the yellow plains of Tibet …19
Down at Camp 3, George and Big Ed were becoming concerned. It was right on dark when they saw three climbers cramponing down the last slopes at great speed.
Are you all OK? shouted George.
Yes!
Did you climb the bugger?
Yes!
Bloody good show!
What time did you get on top?
Quarter to six, said Earle.
Hell, you took a risk! said George.20
In his diary that night, Ed wrote glumly:
Mukut Parbat climbed today but alas George and I not in the lucky party … Pasang went very well and said of the ridge, ‘Very difficult.’ Ed C. developed snow blindness due to no snow goggles. I was very disappointed at missing the summit especially as I was going OK when we turned back. Great credit must be given however to Earle’s persistence and courage in continuing. The boys are all too tired to eat …21
This was not the script Ed had written for himself. He was fitter and stronger than any of them and by now his acclimatisation was really starting to kick in. Surely if anyone was going to reach the summit of Mukut Parbat it would be him. Given more time to reflect, Ed and George might have realised they were underestimating the Riddiford trio. Earle had a reputation for conserving his energy for the most important climb on a trip. If there was an important first ascent he was there, fired up and resolved. Ed Cotter was more laidback than the others. He observed ambition with amused detachment, but he was a natural athlete. His agility was such that he could walk considerable distances on his hands and had done so, to the alarm of both passengers and crew, on the rail of the boat travelling from Sydney to Colombo. When the expedition porters had been brought to a halt above Badrinath by a narrow log spanning a mountain torrent, Cotter had carried the first load across, then returned in the reverse direction on his hands to applause and laughter from the Tibetan porters who thereupon picked up their loads and carried on.22 He was unlikely to let the team down on Mukut Parbat. Finally there was Pasang, who not only had the superior strength of all Sherpas at altitude but also was keen to achieve the climb.
Ed Hillary had learnt a lesson that the race is not just to the strong, but to those who have the courage and tenacity to see it through to the end. It was on Mukut Parbat he learnt ‘It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.’
Down at Badrinath they looked at their thin bodies and weighed themselves:
NZ Garhwal Weight loss % loss
Riddiford 73kg 57kg 16kg 21%
Lowe 82kg 70kg 12kg 14%
Hillary 82kg 73kg 9kg 11%
Cotter 71kg 68kg 3kg 4%
‘Big mountains eat flesh,’ said Pasang.
Any two can join us
There was mail waiting for them at Badrinath, including an unsettling cutting from a London paper: later in the year Eric Shipton would be leading a four-man English reconnaissance looking for a route on Everest from Nepal. They talked longingly of what an excitement that would be, and in a moment of optimism Ed remembered the name of Scott Russell, a botanist who had lived and climbed in New Zealand and was now on the committee of the Alpine Club in London.
Unbeknown to the Garhwal group, the same idea had occurred to Roland Ellis of the NZ Alpine Club whose Otago chairman, Harry Stevenson, had known Scott Russell when he’d been climbing in the Southern Alps. The cable read:
any possibility, one or more nz party, consisting riddiford cotter lowe hillary, at present successfully climbing garhwal himalayas, being included forthcoming everest expedition … stop excellent type climbers who through being acclimatised should prove useful adjuncts23
The Garhwal group knew nothing of this second cable. They still had a month for some lesser climbs, and Earle’s topographical curiosity led him back to Nilkantha where he identified a climbable route on a big ice ledge crossing the No
rth Face. By mid-August, the expedition was over. Ed wrote in his diary, ‘I just want to hurry home to the bees now,’ but in the mail bag at the Indian border town of Ranikhet was a startling message.
Scott Russell had asked Shipton what reply he should send in response to the Stevenson cable.
‘The correct answer was obvious,’ Shipton wrote later:
I had already turned down several applicants with very strong qualifications on the ground that I wanted to keep the party small; our slender resources of money and equipment were already stretched and I had no idea where these unknown climbers were or how to contact them. I was about to send a negative reply when, in a moment of nostalgic reflection, I recalled the cheerful countenance of Dan Bryant, and I changed my mind.24
Bryant was a New Zealander who had been on the 1935 Everest expedition. He had been good on ice and Shipton had liked him:
The presence of Dan Bryant would have made dissension difficult to sustain, for any ostentation or humbug became the target of his gentle mockery, which discouraged any of us from taking himself or his grievances too seriously … Tough and thoroughly competent, he had a delicious brand of humour and a huge fund of anecdotes, largely derived from his acute observation of people …25
And as the New Zealand cable pointed out, the Garhwal party would be fit and acclimatised. Without reference to the rest of his party, Shipton instructed Scott Russell to send a cable to Harry Stevenson who in turn would contact the Garhwal group by way of a message to the cable office at Ranikhet. The piece of paper on which it was printed has been lost but the message was clear: ANY TWO CAN JOIN EVEREST RECONNAISSANCE.
In his 1969 autobiography Shipton wrote:
I soon began to regret this, for apart from the complications resulting from the last-minute inclusion of two new members of the party, still in some remote Himalayan valley and with no permits to enter Nepal, I found it far from easy to explain my totally irrational action to my companions. They could not altogether hide their dismay, though they were too polite to express it. Eventually the two New Zealanders caught us up when we were halfway across Nepal. Then for the first time, we learnt their names; they were Earle Riddiford and Edmund Hillary. My momentary caprice was to have far-reaching results.26
Back in Ranikhet the party of four was torn apart by this startling invitation. Which two should go? Shipton was later to say that if he’d known how traumatic the decision would be he would have invited all four – and indeed Cotter suggested just that, reasoning that at worst two of them would be told to go home. The other three, all of them less casual, felt that two meant just that.
Ed Cotter was the first to drop out, a compelling reason being that he didn’t have the cash to continue. That left three who, in order of physical fitness, were Hillary, Lowe and Riddiford. There was a consensus that Hillary should be one of the pair to join Shipton. Cotter wrote home shortly after the decision had been made: ‘I wanted to see Ed H. go, considering him the most suitable.’27 Riddiford wrote in an explanatory letter nine years later: ‘The first suggestion I made was that Ed Hillary should go as he had been outstandingly fit throughout the expedition.’28
Riddiford had a strong case too, though Lowe, with so much at stake, was reluctant to concede. George was physically stronger, and he and Ed had formed a good pair, but Riddiford had some arguments in his favour that were difficult to ignore. For a start he had organised the expedition. Without him none of them would have been in Ranikhet arguing about the invitation. He also had funds available from his uncle Dan Riddiford who had recently sent a donation to help the expedition stay solvent. More telling than anything, Earle had completed the first ascent of Mukut Parbat, while Hillary and Lowe had turned back.
Earle, the lawyer, had a strong case and argued it successfully. So it was that on 8 September, Ed Hillary, Earle Riddiford and Pasang Dawa set off to join Eric Shipton’s reconnaissance of Mt Everest.
Two weeks later, Ed wrote privately to his beekeeping friend Bob Chandler who had donated £10 to expedition funds:
I’ll have quite a few interesting things to discuss with you on return including some of the personality clashes which occurred particularly between Earle and George. Earle proved rather difficult at times and I had to restrain strong impulses to give him a good kick. On the other hand George was something of a disappointment to me as under unpleasant conditions he proved rather lacking in drive and I, in some small measure, rather consider he cost me Mukut Parbat. Keep all this under your hat …29
The Lowe–Riddiford feud played out for many years. George was unforgiving, even though a year later he received his own invitation to join the British prelude to Everest on Cho Oyu. Over the years, Earle’s Christchurch friends stood by him, whilst George’s friends – notably Ed – supported him. Earle, with his ‘cool intellect’, just wasn’t Ed’s sort of person.
– CHAPTER 8 –
Everest Reconnaissance 1951
The decision made, Riddiford and Hillary threw themselves into preparations for their new expedition, buying food in Lucknow and cashing a money transfer of £200 thoughtfully sent by the NZ Alpine Club. Ed sent a telegram to Percy:
Invited Shipton everest Expedition Could not refuse please forgive Erring son reply Rex November Writing Love Edmund1
The pair nearly missed the train leaving for the Nepali border town of Jogbani:
We swept through the gates just as the guard appeared to blow his whistle. His firm cry of ‘Too Late!’ sounded the death-knell of our plans. But Riddiford was not the man to give in too lightly. His forceful persuasion (and judicious baksheesh) won the day. We leapt into a second-class carriage … a wild scattering of coins to our coolies, a sudden jerk that nearly threw us on the floor and another expedition had begun.2
Leaving the train after a two-day journey, they moved north to Dharan where they hired 17 porters to carry their loads into the rain-sodden hills flanking the great Arun River whose tributaries were in high flood. The largest of them, 50 metres wide, was a torrent of brown, turbulent water. New Zealand climbers of Ed’s generation prided themselves on their ability to cross flooded rivers using a long pole. With his ice-axe Ed cut a three-metre sapling. Then with a bow-wave breaking around Earle at the upstream end, Ed as anchor at the downstream end, and a cluster of laden porters in between, they surged across.
Further north they had to cross the broad Arun River, a massive body of fast-flowing brown water, in a dugout canoe with very little freeboard. As an encouragement for the boatmen to paddle hard, the oily surges on this stretch of river gave way to rapids that would be certain death if the boat failed to cross in time. The combined dangers of a mountainous terrain and widespread infectious diseases made the life expectancy of a Nepali hill dweller short at best, but for Arun boatmen life must have been exceptionally brief.
The dangers of the river behind them, Earle and Ed set off at a fast pace through steep, wet forest to reach Dingla, the village where they would join the British party. Ed wrote:
As we climbed rapidly upwards, I couldn’t help wondering what the four men we were meeting would be like. Of course we all knew about Shipton, his tough trips, his ability to go to great heights, and his policy of having cheap and mobile expeditions by living largely off the land. He was certainly the most famous living Himalayan mountaineer. But what did he look like? And what about his three companions? …
I looked at Riddiford. Thin and bony, with a scraggy beard and scruffy, dirty clothes, he didn’t look a particularly prepossessing type. I knew from experience that I probably looked a lot rougher. But these Englishmen – for all I knew they might shave every day; they might be sticklers for the right thing. We’d have to smarten up a bit and watch our language.
As we entered Dingla we were met by a Sherpa who informed us that the Burra Sahib was waiting to meet us … We followed into a dark doorway and up some stairs … and as we came into the room, four figures scrambled to meet us and my immediate impression was of large bodies in solid
condition. My first feeling was one of relief. I have rarely seen a more disreputable bunch, and my visions of changing for dinner faded away forever …3
A strongly built man with a short grizzled beard turned towards me with a welcoming smile and I knew I was meeting Eric Shipton for the first time …4
He introduced his three companions: Bill Murray … who had led an all-Scottish expedition to the Himalayas; Dr. Michael Ward, a well-built young chap with an easy impetuous manner; and … Tom Bourdillon … an enormous chap … obviously as strong as a horse.5
How did the Kiwis look to the Shipton party? Mike Ward wrote:
Ed Hillary and Earle Riddiford charged up the hill carrying immense Victorian-looking ice-axes. Both were gaunt figures in patched clothes … They were both wearing peaked cloth hats with a flap down the neck. From the way they bounded up the hill and the ease with which they wolfed down a horrid meal of boiled rice and indeterminate green vegetables they were both in training and used to the squalid aspects of Himalayan travel.6
There was no doubt that by September 1951 Hillary and Riddiford were able to hit the ground running, particularly when compared with Ward, Bourdillon and Murray who had come from desk jobs. The New Zealanders had been climbing for three months at heights of 15,000–20,000ft. They looked, smelt and moved like mountain goats. Added to this was Ed’s occupational strength from carrying 40-kilogram combs of honey around South Auckland for eight hours a day over 15 years of harvests. It was an advantage that Ed would preserve through to 29 May 1953.