Death Zone

by Matt Dickinson

  The Japanese attitude created an ugly mood amongst the teams at camp three – not least our own. Brian was outraged at their behaviour and threatened, ‘I’ll rip the flag off their pole and piss on it.’

  Al took a different view. ‘All this talk about rescue is crap. There’s no way the Indians could have been rescued from where they were, no matter how many people tried. There wasn’t much the Japanese could have done.’

  Cowper wrote in his article:

  No one believes for one moment that the Japanese could have saved all three Indians. But most mountaineers I spoke to say that if all five members of the Japanese team had concentrated on the one frost-bitten Indian at the first step then one life would surely have been saved.

  At the time I agreed with him.

  On the 13th, I hung around the Indian mess tent like a vulture waiting for the surviving Indian climbers to drag themselves back into camp. They moved like men returning from a war – shattered figures devastated by the loss of their friends. The leader Mohindor Singh came out of the tent and put his arm around one of the returning climbers as he stood in front of the cairn of prayer flags, his shoulders heaving as he sobbed with tears. Kees was asleep in the tent at that point so I shot the sequence, zooming in for a close up on the faces of the weeping men and trying to switch off the little voice inside me that was telling me I really shouldn’t be doing this.

  Later I asked Singh if I could interview him for the film but he was too stricken with grief at that point and told me he would talk in a couple of days. After I thought about it, however, I realised that to interview Singh would be a pretty gross intrusion while he was still mourning the deaths of his team members, and I didn’t raise it with him again. I did, however, interview members of our own team to try and get an insight into how the catastrophe had affected them. Kees and I squashed into Sundeep and Roger’s tent; ghoulish though it may seem, I wanted to record their reactions to the increasingly bad news from above.

  Roger spoke first:

  We accepted that people might die this year on Everest. But it’s one thing to accept that intellectually, and another to be sitting here in our tents knowing that people are dying up there on the mountain.

  Sundeep was also beginning to question his motives for the climb:

  It makes you think about how much you want the summit. What you’re prepared to risk – what you’re prepared to lose.

  There was a growing awareness that the events of this twenty-four-hour period were likely to affect us for a long time to come. Our strategy had already been knocked massively out of shape by the unsettled weather of the last few days, and now the deaths caused by the storm would take a deeper toll on the already vulnerable nerves of the team.

  8

  For the next four days, the bad weather continued to pin us down at camp three, with no sign of any change. Our entire team had now been stuck at 6,450 metres for seven days, far longer than had originally been planned. Physically we were deteriorating every day, and yet we still had no firm idea of when we would be going for the summit. Each day, we went to sleep clinging to the hope that the next morning would give us our ‘weather window’. Each day dawned with high winds and snowfalls, condemning us to more time on our backs in the freezing camp.

  The original plan had been so effectively destroyed by the storm that most of us could barely remember what dates we had originally set aside for our summit attempt. The very fabric of the expedition was in danger of being ripped apart. Team ‘A’ was now tired and debilitated; Brian particularly had been very deeply affected by the deaths on the mountain and felt that the bad weather was likely to continue for a while as he told me in an interview we filmed in his tent:

  We’re all very frightened. This has knocked us all for six. We’ve got to treat this mountain with a great deal of respect.

  Kees and I were also nervous and on edge; our film was heavily dependent on getting footage from high on the mountain and as each day passed that possibility was looking more remote.

  The camp, like us, seemed to be falling apart. The mess tent was now damaged and offering even less protection than before. The crevasse in front of our tent was widening as the weather warmed, swallowing up rocks and threatening to engulf Nga Temba’s tent. The toilet was now a veritable mountain of shit, and foul smells were drifting out of the crevasses where generations of waste had been dumped by previous expeditions.

  All the minor ailments that we had lived with since arriving in Tibet now flared into irritating infections. Sore throats, split fingers, mouth ulcers, blisters, diarrhoea, piles … we all had our problems and sitting on our backsides was only making them worse …

  Team ‘B’, having arrived later to advance base, was generally in better condition, both mentally and physically. Their bodies had endured fewer days above 6,000 metres, and they could see how feeble team ‘A’ was beginning to look. The weather continued to be unstable, with high winds and snowstorms most afternoons.

  Even so, it still took me by surprise when Simon called a meeting in the mess tent and announced that he was proposing to let the ‘B’ team go first.

  ‘You can’t do that!’ I protested, seeing our whole enterprise suddenly threatened.

  ‘Why not?’ Simon replied, icily calm.

  ‘Why change the plan?’

  ‘You guys aren’t showing any signs of leaving for your summit push,’ Roger pointed out, ‘and while we’re waiting here we’re running our bodies into the ground. If you won’t take the risk on the conditions, we will. It doesn’t make sense for us to wait here any more.’

  I could see his point. Our own team, or more particularly Al, Brian and Barney, had shown extreme reluctance to leave until they were totally convinced the weather window was right. There had even been talk of retreating again to base camp and waiting for another push, but I wanted to avoid that at all costs. I had a suspicion that Brian would not be up to another long haul up the glacier no matter how much rest he got down low.

  Now, the ‘B’ team were upping the ante, and putting us under pressure to get off our asses and move – or step aside and let them through.

  ‘It’s like Simon says,’ Sundeep pointed out, ‘we can sit here for ever waiting for the perfect day. We won’t climb the mountain sitting at advance base camp.’

  ‘I don’t see what the panic is,’ Al put in, ‘we’ve still got nearly two weeks before we have to be out of here. There’s more time left than you think, and the best conditions are often towards the end of the month. We can blow it by being too impatient.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Brian, ‘it’s way too windy at the moment and it’s way too cold. With the filming, we’re going to be in for long periods of standing around. Kees is more than likely to get frostbitten fingers if we go now and he tries to shoot.’

  Brian was right, but his words gave the ‘B’ team more ammunition.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Simon. ‘The filming does take more time. If the conditions are a bit marginal, then it doesn’t make so much sense for the filming group to be in that slot. You need super perfect conditions.’

  ‘Hang on a minute!’ I had to fight our corner on this one. ‘That isn’t the case. You’ve all seen how fast we’ve been working. I agree that on the glacier we held things up quite a bit when we were shooting but on the summit push it’ll be mostly Al going on ahead and filming Brian coming up. Like he did on the Col. The reason Kees and I are there is to do the interviews and stuff in the evenings at the camps, when it doesn’t affect our speed at all.’

  ‘Keep your hair on, Matt, no one’s saying the film team are slower,’ Simon told me. ‘But you have got more gear to carry and you will risk frostbite if you have to take gloves off to film in the coldest conditions.’

  ‘OK. But I resent the implication that we are slower, because we’re not.’

  Simon concluded the meeting in his usual diplomatic style:

  ‘All right. Well, in any case, there’s no decision we can make until the we
ather clears up a bit.’

  ‘So which team’s going first?’ Tore, the Norwegian, was, like Roger and Sundeep, itching to get into the summit push.

  There was a pause while Simon looked over to Barney.

  ‘I’ll have to have a chat with Barney and Nga Temba about it,’ he said, ‘and we’ll let you know.’

  This inconclusive end left us all unsettled. In the tent that night I found it extremely difficult to sleep, worrying that our slot was about to vanish, leaving us to deteriorate gradually here until we had no strength left. I came up with a rearguard action if it turned out that the ‘B’ team were given the go-ahead to leave first; this was the decision to send Kees up with them, so that at least some of the high-altitude filming could take place.

  I also resolved to give Sundeep, the ‘B’ team member I judged most likely to make the summit, a lightning course in handling the video camera. It was a very long shot but if I gave him the spare Sony, he might just be able to shoot something if they got lucky with the conditions and topped out.

  But by the evening of May 14 no decision had been announced. The conversation had not been raised again, and in fact, I needn’t have worried, for conditions were about to clear.

  *

  On the morning of the 15th, I awoke to the unmistakable sound of equipment being sorted and packed in Brian and Barney’s tent next door. Kees had woken earlier and was probably having his first cup of tea in the mess tent. Although it was still too early for the sun to hit the fabric of our tent, I could sense by the brilliance of the reflected light off the glacier that the sky was clear.

  I poked my head out of the front of the tent. Barney was there, with his blue equipment barrel by his side.

  ‘What’s the news?’ I asked him.

  ‘We’re on.’

  A massive shot of mixed adrenalin and dread ran through my body. The thought that we would finally be leaving filled me with contradictory emotions: I was pleased that something was happening at last, when just a couple of days before I had been fighting to keep our ‘number one’ slot. But we had spent so many days now at advance base camp that we were used to the inactivity. My body felt stiff, unfit and unready for the challenge. My mind was also unprepared. The sense of purpose, of focusing on a single recognised objective, had been thrown by the events of the storm. All the confidence, impatience and optimism I had experienced on leaving base camp was now replaced by the leaden sense that we were out of condition and out of time.

  I was acutely aware of the amount of body weight I had lost. It seemed to have fallen off me in this last week living at 21,500 feet on a deficient diet and with an appetite which was feeble at best. My legs, never abundantly endowed with meaty tissue, were now as skinny as two sticks of celery. My midriff was likewise reduced; pinching the skin of my stomach between two fingers raised not an ounce of fat.

  I estimated I had lost at least 10 kilogrammes, which worked out at more than a kilogramme a week; but I didn’t really know how this would affect my performance. Perhaps if the muscle were still intact, I would not notice any difference? Or, more worryingly, would I suddenly run out of steam high on the mountain? The only solace was that all my fellow climbers were in the same state. Everyone had lost a comparable amount of weight, in Brian’s case perhaps as much as fifteen kilogrammes.

  Advance base camp had been a haven from the storm, and like a creature who has hibernated for too long through a cold winter, the prospect of leaving this place of security was deeply unattractive. Here was safety; up there was danger, as the storm had so tragically reminded us.

  I retreated back into the tent and lay down for a few precious moments, trying to banish the apathy which threatened to overwhelm me. The very last thing I wanted was to push myself back up the Col, particularly as the recent heavy snows were still sitting ready to avalanche at the first warming of the weather … like today for example.

  Simon shook the tent. ‘Wake up, Matt, you’re leaving in half an hour.’

  I realised that the longer we were delayed, the better the chance of the Col avalanching on us. I got dressed in double time and was soon outside with the others preparing my rucksack of gear.

  There was none of the banter and camaraderie with which the ‘B’ team had seen us off from base camp. Now, they were in sombre mood, no doubt contemplating the stressful extra days they were about to have waiting here. Their bid to take over our slot as team ‘A’ had so nearly succeeded and now all four were looking as if they regretted not pushing a bit harder.

  There was no sense of excitement or anticipation. The storm, and the knowledge of the fatalities it had caused, weighed heavily on us all as we shouldered the packs and checked over our equipment lists for the final time.

  We shook hands and there were a few muttered words of encouragement. Even Brian, normally the loudest of us, was strangely quiet as we plodded very slowly up through the other camps on the strip. As we passed through the Indian tents, they were already packing to begin their evacuation.

  All five of us were moving slowly and it was a relief to have a rest when we reached the permanent ice before putting on the crampons and starting up the plateau before the Col. On our first trip here, the plateau hadn’t bothered me at all; now, with the sun radiating strongly off the ice, I felt trickles of sweat soak my back as the temperature rose. We all stopped frequently to apply glacier cream, stuffing it into our ears and noses which experience had taught us were particularly vulnerable to the ferocious radiation.

  I had always considered the plateau to be flat, but now I realised it is not. It runs in a steady rise, which now took its toll on my weakened legs. I drank regular sips of juice from my bottle, and stuffed down a couple of toffee crisps, but could not detect the burst of energy which these normally give.

  After three hours we reached the base of the Col where the weather took a sudden turn for the worse. A black cloud swept without warning into the sky above the snow ridge and a wind whipped straight down the face at high speed. It began to snow, then hail, and against my skin I could feel my sweat-soaked inner thermal shirt beginning to cool down uncomfortably.

  I was missing a couple of important images from our first trip up the ice wall, specifically a shot of Brian approaching the Col, and something from the bottom of the wall to show how intimidating the hanging glacier is to anyone looking up at it. We brought out the camera and filmed these quickly as the weather conditions changed again to reveal bursts of sunshine through the sporadic cloud.

  Then we threaded on our harnesses and began the climb. With three hours of exertion behind me since advance base, my legs now felt better in tune and I found I was moving fairly fluidly. The muscle fatigue which had set in after our prolonged period of lying on our backs was easing off. To my relief I found I was still reasonably fit.

  The condition of the snow was my main concern. The storm, and the unstable weather of the last few days, had dumped millions of tons on to the Face. It was sitting on top of wind-polished ice, and therefore liable to avalanche without warning. We moved as fast as we could to reduce our exposure time, but it still took us a further three hours to reach camp four.

  Kees was the first to reach our tent. ‘Take a look at this!’ he exclaimed.

  I stooped down to look into the tent, which we had carefully cleaned before we left after our first acclimatisation climb to the Col.

  The interior was in a disgusting state, with discarded tea bags, foil soup packets and other rubbish stuck fast into frozen puddles where liquids had been spilled and left. In the foyer, yellow stains marked where urine bottles had been tipped out carelessly on to the ice, and the floor of the tent itself was now sagging into a deep hollow where body warmth had frozen down into the carefully flattened platform. The fabric of one side wall had been scorched by a gas stove, and several jagged rips marked where crampons had been worn inside. Our sealed packs of food had been ripped open and plundered.

  Al came over and took a look. ‘Fucking toerags,’ he sai
d. ‘I told you this would happen. We’ve had squatters.’ His own tent was in a similar mess.

  ‘Who the hell has left them in this state?’ Brian was outraged.

  ‘People must have used them for refuge in the storm.’

  Al was right again. Our camp was one of the best set up and the best stocked at the North Col. During the chaos of the storm, with teams in disarray retreating off the mountain, it was hardly surprising that some had sought shelter in what amounted to a free hotel.

  ‘Or it could be the International team.’

  That was another possibility. Late in the season a mixed international team had arrived at advance base camp. Their tactics seemed a world away from the the structured logistics of Himalayan Kingdoms, and as far as we could see, they were essentially a group of individuals who had bought their way into a shared permit. Rumours flew around the camp that they might try ‘squatter’ tactics – utilising the vacant tents of other teams rather than carrying their own.

  I preferred to believe that our tents had been used during the storm. At least that might explain why someone in extremis could leave them as such an unbelievable tip.

  Now we had to expend valuable energy clearing them out and making our base habitable as far as we could. An hour later we were ready to start rehydrating our bodies after the climb. It struck me that we would be in serious trouble if camps five and six had also been plundered. If our oxygen supplies were gone then our summit attempt was as good as over.

  That night at the North Col was a restless one, accompanied by a buffeting wind which beat sporadically against the tent.

  Now that the previously flat floor of our Quasar had been melted out into a deep scoop by other occupants, it was no longer possible to get a comfortable sleeping platform. No matter how many positions we tried, the slope always won, pitching Kees and myself into an undignified and sleep-defying tangle in the central dip. In the early hours of the morning we rearranged the entire tent, placing the rucksacks in the centre to reduce the slope. It worked well enough to allow a few hours of fitful sleep.