The Other Side of Everest

by Matt Dickinson

  The answer to all of those was an emphatic “no.” A cozy domestic life was absolutely the last priority on my personal list. It threatened every freedom I had and seemed to me to be tantamount to giving up. A few beers later I was still wrestling with the problem, and I decided that flipping a bottle top might give me a hand in the decision-making process. Logo side up would mean yes, crinkle side up would mean no.

  I balanced the metal disc on my thumbnail for a second, then spun it into the air.

  When I got back to England I asked Fiona to marry me.

  We set the date for September and then I left to guide drunken Australians down the Nile, leaving Fiona and her mother to make all the arrangements for the wedding.

  The first few years were manic: Fiona ran a Tuscan villa company from a back room of our small house in St. Albans and had Thomas, Alistair, and Gregory in rapid succession. I concentrated on establishing my career in television. By a series of lucky breaks, the BBC offered me a researcher contract on Wogan, the early-evening chat show. The show was live, which added a certain adrenaline to the job. There was also intense competition among the eight researchers, who had to come up with a constant flow of high-profile guests if we were to get our contracts renewed.

  It was an extremely exciting and glamorous show to work on. With guests like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Princess Anne, Mel Gibson, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, our average working week was filled with extremely interesting lunch appointments. There were moments of real drama too; on the night before Live Aid, the Wogan producer, Jon Plowman, decided late that he wanted Bob Geldof on that night’s lineup. We tracked Geldof down to Wembley where he was putting the finishing touches to the biggest live concert ever, but we couldn’t get a message to him.

  “Go and get him,” Plowman told me.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Just get him on the show.”

  I left the television center at about 5:50 P.M., in a souped-up BBC limousine. Wogan went live at 7 P.M. Having finagled my way into Wembley Stadium past some pretty determined security, I found that Geldof was onstage rehearsing with the Boomtown Rats. Between numbers I walked onto the middle of the stage, told him who I was, and told him the BBC wanted him for that night’s Wogan. Geldof told me, in his usual earthy style, that he was busy and couldn’t come. I pointed out that if he made it onto the show he would be able to persuade an extra eight million people to watch Live Aid the following day. Geldof walked with me off the stage there and then, and after a high-speed chase through West London we made it to the studio just as the opening titles to the show were running.

  It was that kind of program.

  By 1988 I was in a good position at the BBC, with the prospect of producing and directing jobs just a few years away. But the constraints of working within a big institution were eating away at me. I was already restless to move on. When I looked at the staff producers above me, with their safe salaries and secure careers, I realized that I did not want to be one of the BBC establishment men.

  I resigned from the BBC and went freelance, a move that most of my colleagues thought was crazy. Fiona supported me completely, even though the move would inevitably mean less financial security.

  John Gau Productions offered me my first freelance job, as associate producer on the ITV series Voyager, which featured expeditions and adventures in the wild corners of the planet. That run of thirteen half-hour programs changed the direction of my career, and took me increasingly out onto location. In my first year on the job I shot in countries such as China, Egypt, and Morocco. The whole process of producing Voyager was a fascinating one, but more than anything I loved being in the field, filming people who were the best in the world in their chosen fields of adventure.

  The films were highly visual and got a prime-time early-evening slot on ITV where they won good audience figures. But for me, their real success was in the way we portrayed the adventurers. We tried, as far as we could, to get the protagonists to reveal more about why they chose to risk their lives for a goal that most people would regard as crazy. Getting under the skin of our heroes was the key.

  By 1990 I was producing and directing for the second series of Voyager, filming (among other projects) a record-breaking hang-glider flight from the world’s highest live volcano in Ecuador, and following a world powerboat champion as he attempted to regain his title in one of the world’s most dangerous sports.

  Then things got really busy. Together with Voyager series editor Colin Luke I created the BBCI series Classic Adventure, which we filmed on location in India, Kenya, Brazil, and Greenland. We pushed the limits a little further on this new series, and the expeditions we filmed were sometimes extreme. In India we shot a very hazardous whitewater descent of the Brahmaputra River; in Kenya we filmed a team of hang-glider and microlight pilots flying through the wilderness terrain of the Rift Valley.

  Life as a freelancer in television is always precarious but, specializing as I did in overseas expedition work, there were other inevitable pressures that built steadily as the years went by. The sheer amount of time I spent away was definitely making life more difficult for Fiona, as she was left to manage all our financial affairs. We had always walked a tightrope financially and the responsibility of staving off mortgage companies and banks was often left to her.

  For me the travel was part of the drug, part of the kick of the films I made, but being on the road so much was sometimes difficult for me too. Having established my career, I couldn’t possibly afford to turn work down, and the relentless months of location work meant I missed many important events that I really should have been there for. My brother’s wedding. Numerous of my own wedding anniversaries. New Year’s Eves. Half of the time I wasn’t even in the country to see my own films being broadcast.

  But there is a limit to how many “Happy Birthday” telephone calls you can make to your children from hotel rooms in Chiang Mai or Mombasa before it starts to get you down. Then in 1992, while I was away in Nepal filming an expedition of disabled climbers attempting a trekking peak, Fiona’s sister Stephanie suffered an unexpected tragedy. Her husband, Howard, who was thirty-one, collapsed on a rugby pitch from heart failure and later died. Completely unaware of this and totally out of touch in the Himalayas, I got back to Kathmandu to hear this tragic news (four weeks old) from Fiona. I had missed the funeral; that was bad enough, but more important to me, I had missed the chance to help Fiona and her family through an incredibly difficult time. Fiona really needed me during those days and weeks and I wasn’t there to support her. It had always been a standing joke between us (albeit a bittersweet one) that I was the “invisible man,” but on that occasion being the invisible man wasn’t a joke at all. I felt I had failed Fiona in a very fundamental way, and that wasn’t easy to live with for either of us.

  The list of companies I worked for grew through the early 1990s as the projects rolled on: Mentorn Films, Pioneer Productions, Antelope Films, Mosaic Pictures, Goldhawk Films, Diverse Productions, they all wanted adventure and I was one of the very few directors specializing in that field.

  Somewhere in the recesses of my brain, and in Fiona’s too, a few red warning lights were beginning to flash. Many of the projects I was directing contained elements of danger, or featured people who were taking risks. Broadcasters want drama, and as the years go by, they have come to expect “extreme” expeditions almost as a matter of course. As the person in charge of the content of the film, it was my job to push—sometimes quite hard—for the best possible pictures. How many times, I began to ask myself, could I ask people to raft perilous rapids “one more time,” or film climbers working on extreme cliffs without ropes, before someone was going to get seriously hurt? No film is worth even the smallest injury, let alone fatality, but I had heard of many instances where filming had led to just that.

  The possibility of something going badly wrong increasingly haunted me, and there were risks for the crew as well. If there’s a river to be run, we run it too. If there’s a cav
e system to be explored, someone from the crew has to be there shooting it. In China, making a film about a surfer trying to ride the biggest tidal wave in the world, we got our crew boat caught in the maelstrom and flipped over. The revolving propeller of the outboard missed the cameraman’s head by a matter of inches. I can think of plenty of other near misses, most of which I never told Fiona about.

  Then, in January 1994, I stared death in the face.

  We were filming on Mount William, a peak in Antarctica that has on its upper slopes a number of enormous hanging glaciers and seracs. As we descended from the summit, on the final stages of the climb, the seven of us (five climbers and two of us filming) entered a steep ice gulley. It was four o’clock in the morning and the scene was lit by the gloomy half-light of the Antarctic summer.

  Suddenly, several hundred meters (six hundred or so feet) above us, the sky filled with a terrifying sight. The billowing cloud of a massive avalanche was descending upon us from the Northeast Face of the mountain. It moved incredibly fast, and there was barely time for a screamed warning before it engulfed us.

  In the few seconds before we were hit, my brain was able to calculate where the avalanche must have come from and to conclude that the whole of the Northeast Face had ripped away. All day we had known full well that the snow was in prime avalanche condition, but we had waited six weeks for a weather opportunity to climb the peak and this was our last chance. Now, millions of tons of snow and ice were about to smash us to pulp.

  There was absolutely no doubt whatsoever in my mind that we were all going to be killed. It was the same for the other six, they too saw no way we could survive. We pushed ourselves into the ice and waited to be crushed or ripped off the Face and dashed onto the rocks hundreds of meters below us. It is a very curious sensation to be utterly sure that your life is about to end. My life didn’t exactly flash before me but I do remember feeling an extraordinary experience of calm and a sense of wonder at the power that was unleashed upon us.

  It didn’t happen. The shock wave engulfed us at more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) per hour but the debris of the ice avalanche shot right over our heads. The gulley was steep enough to have thrown the force of the avalanche away from us. Some smaller blocks hit us, and one of the climbers nearly lost an eye from an impact, but apart from the bruising, we were fine. Somehow we had all managed to hang on to our positions. Ten minutes earlier we had been standing right at the top of the gulley where death would have been inevitable.

  It took me a while to tell Fiona about that incident.

  After the avalanche I was increasingly aware that I had to move on from adventure documentaries if I was to develop my filmmaking career—and stand a reasonable chance of staying alive. Apart from the risks, there are only so many expeditions that you can film in a world in which all the major challenges of exploration have been ticked off. I was exploiting a very tiny niche, and with each film I made, that niche was diminishing.

  But, pressed by the need to earn money, I had no choice but to continue to put my energies into developing new adventure projects in an attempt to keep the cash coming in while at the same time doubling my efforts in another field, movie scriptwriting. Increasingly, I found it hard to summon any real enthusiasm for the adventure films I was making, and my movie ideas were an escape—a way of dreaming, a way of letting my imagination run wild.

  As far as my relationship with Fiona went, this too was entering a dangerously rocky phase by the end of 1994. The pressures of trying to hold the family together when I was so often away, combined with my perpetual restlessness, were adding up to a diminishing return for Fiona. She was putting a great deal more into the relationship than I was, and getting less out of it year by year. Trying to keep tabs on an absent and increasingly wayward husband was no joke and our relationship seemed to teeter from one crisis to another.

  Fiona had never tried to own me. That was the beauty of our relationship, but it was also its flaw. We were two very different people united by a bond of real love, by a family, and by the tendons of loyalty that we both felt. But we had always known that, in essence, we were not similar people at all. There were a lot of dreams we shared, but there were a hell of a lot more that we didn’t. Those fundamental differences had now reared up and were prising us painfully apart.

  The horrible realization was beginning to dawn that Fiona might actually be better off without me, and I found that very difficult to deal with. But to resolve it, to become the husband she actually wanted, would mean giving up freedoms that, selfishly, I had come to take as a matter of course. I had always been a traveler, in fact I had always seen myself as a free spirit (whatever that is), but I loved Fiona far too much to keep hurting her as much as I seemed to be doing. A body clock inside me was tick-tock-ticking away, telling me, whispering in my ear like it first did when I found myself lured off at the age of seventeen on journey after journey into the Sahara Desert, that it was time to go. But an equally strong set of pressures was telling me to grow up and meet my responsibilities.

  Now, the Everest expedition gave me the opportunity to sort myself out and make a decision about which direction my life was going to take. Ten weeks in Tibet would give me plenty of time to think, and away from the problem perhaps I could find a new perspective and work it all out.

  I called Julian Ware at ITN Productions and told him I would take the Everest job. Then I loaded twenty volumes of the Children’s Britannica into a rucksack and went out into the footpaths and fields of rural Hertfordshire for a five-hour walk.

  I chose my camera team with a great deal of care. Very few camera operators have filmed above 8,000 meters (26,246 feet) but if our project was to be a success I had to virtually guarantee that one member of my team could be there to record a summit attempt.

  Alan Hinkes was my first choice, and I put the proposal to him on the telephone with just six weeks remaining before we were due to leave. As Britain’s most successful high-altitude climber, Al has an Everest-sized profile in the world of mountaineering and had filmed on the summit of K2. He was one of only two British climbers to have reached the summit of the second-highest mountain in the world (K2 is 8,611 meters [28,251 feet]) and returned alive. In addition, he had summitted four other 8,000-meter (26,246-foot) peaks.

  Al had twice been on Everest but the summit had eluded him. I knew he was looking for another opportunity to go back, and my offer to pay him would be hard to resist. He wasn’t trained as a cameraman but I was confident he could turn in a workable result in extreme conditions.

  A plain-speaking northerner, Al has a reputation for bluntness and has his fair share of enemies in the climbing world among those who resent his highly commercial approach and his talent for self-publicity. He is a hard person physically, capable of remarkable endurance, and at first meeting he seems a hard case psychologically too.

  With a tightly cropped military haircut and a set of glacial blue eyes, Hinkes looks every inch the high-altitude hero that he undoubtedly is. He has a pugnacious undercurrent that rubs some people the wrong way. Very much an individual, he had not always made a good team player on previous expeditions, I was told, but from my point of view that was not so important. I wasn’t hiring him for his diplomatic skills. What I needed was someone who could operate a camera in the Death Zone and there are few people better qualified than Al to do that.

  Al listened carefully to my proposal, successfully managed to bump up the fee I was offering, and accepted the contract.

  For principal cameraman in the lower altitudes I chose Kees ’t Hooft (his name is pronounced “Case”), a Dutch filmmaker based in London who I had worked with before on several films. Kees has the vague look of a slightly dotty professor, with a thinning sweep of gingery hair and the refined features of an intellectual. He spends his weekends attending Jungian philosophy classes and has an inexplicable fascination for the English aristocracy. He is never happier than when rubbing shoulders with dukes, duchesses, and lady dowagers, and presumabl
y they like rubbing shoulders with him too because he does seem to meet a lot of them.

  Essentially a gentle person, Kees has the type of excessive good manners normally found only in butlers and wine waiters, but underneath the mild exterior lurks a very strong climber. He had been to almost 7,000 meters (22,965 feet) on Makalu (8,481 meters [27,824 feet]) filming for a Channel 4 documentary, and had operated camera for me on Pokalde Peak in Nepal. I called to check if he was interested.

  “Certainly, but what date does the expedition finish?”

  “The sixth of June. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing really, just that I’m getting married on the eighth.”

  My heart sank. This news would obviously rule Kees out of the expedition, leaving me with a gap difficult to fill. Surely he couldn’t abandon his fiancée for ten weeks just before the wedding? Could he?

  Yes he could.

  “I think I had better have a little chat with my fiancée,” Kees told me, sounding numb.

  Kees asked me for a twenty-four-hour cooling-off period to talk things through with Katie Isbester, his betrothed. A professor of political science at the University of Toronto, Katie didn’t hesitate. “I would be most upset if you didn’t go on my account,” she told him.

  Kees called me back and told me he was on for the expedition.

  The third member of my team was Ned Johnston, an American filmmaker of high repute. He would join us to shoot on 16-millimeter film for the first three weeks of the expedition, coming with us as far as Advance Base Camp and then returning with the film footage to the UK, leaving the rest of us to continue on digital video camera.

  The remaining weeks passed in a blur of equipment-gathering, physical training to get myself fit, and the one thousand and one other details that precede any major shoot.