To the Edges of the Earth

by Edward J. Larson

  By the end of June, having given up on K2, the duke looked instead for a nearby mountain where he could set a world altitude record. Returning to Concordia and turning east onto the Upper Baltoro Glacier, he settled on majestic Chogolisa, with its rectangular, pup-tent-like shape and twin 25,000-foot summits, the lower of which Martin Conway had named Bride Peak when he saw it in 1892. Proceeding ahead as far as Concordia, Sella took advantage of a rare break in the weather to climb ridges on either side of the basin and make a complete photographic panorama of surrounding mountains and valleys.

  FOR THE DUKE’S ASSAULT on Chogolisa, the expedition moved its base camp to the south side of the Upper Baltoro below the mountain’s east face. The 26,500-foot summit of the Gasherbrum massif, Conway’s Hidden Peak, originally K5, stood across the valley—the eleventh-highest mountain in the world. The broadly pyramidal 24,000-foot Baltoro Kangri, Conway’s Golden Throne, rose to the east. Were it not for clouds and storms, it would have been a stunning campsite. De Filippi and Negrotto remained there for thirteen days while the duke and six guides pushed up Chogolisa in ever worsening weather. Hoping to photograph it, Sella joined the first part of the climb, but returned with only one grand panorama after realizing that the worsening weather would bar him from taking further pictures. July had brought the summer monsoon, with heavy snows turning to heavier rains in the valley. Snows persisted on the mountain, where the duke’s party repeatedly sought shelter in small climbing tents. “Avalanches fell continually from the wall, fed from the uninterrupted heavy snows, during the whole time of our stay here,” De Filippi reported. “In the warm part of the day it seemed as though the whole mountain were actually falling apart, so huge were the masses of ice, rock and snow that hurled themselves down from it.”41 Those below could only imagine what the climbers above were experiencing.

  Once again fooled by perspective, the duke misjudged the ascent. Originally, he planned to climb Chogolisa’s broad northern face, which looked like a snowfield from a distance. On close inspection, the lower portion consisted of chaotic torrents of steep séracs—“foaming white cataracts like frozen Niagaras” was how De Filippi depicted them—clearly impossible for porters to climb.42

  Instead, the duke opted for an eastern route up a steep glacial icefall and over a snow slope to the Chogolisa saddle, then across a dome-shaped shoulder toward the mountain’s eastern summit, Conway’s Bride Peak. “The route was long and not easy to the saddle, with the final part unknown,” the duke observed, “but it was the only one that would allow taking supplies up to the shoulder.”43 This was central to his plan. The Balti porters would transport supplies to an advance camp on the mountain. The duke anticipated that this portion of the ascent would take two days at most. It took eight.

  Terrain and weather combined to slow the initial ascent to a crawl. “The glacier was broken up into large blocks, between which were wide and treacherous openings disguised by the snow,” De Filippi explained. The climbers “could never tell whether the latter would be firm beneath their tread, or whether a bottomless gulf would open where they set their feet.” The snow atop the ice stood knee-deep at best, waist-deep at worst. Plowing through it, the Italians observed, was “infinite labour at every step.”44 Snowshoes scarcely helped. After three days, a furious snowstorm kept the climbers in camp for three more, so that by the sixth day, July 8, they had ascended only 1,300 vertical feet. Two days with improved weather over the snow slope took them to the saddle at nearly 21,700 feet, temporarily freeing the Balti porters to head down. “They had performed the work of real Alpine porters, coming up over the séracs with full loads of luggage, and had lived in camps on the snows without fires and contrary to all the habits of their normal lives,” De Filippi reported.45 The Italian guides were impressed: locals could learn their work and replace them in the Himalayas and Karakoram.

  The duke with six guides stood less than 4,300 vertical feet from the summit. He estimated the ascent would take two more days, but again failed to reckon with terrain and weather. Their legs sinking (or “postholing”) into the deep snow, they crossed the saddle on July 11 and were poised to summit on the 12th when the weather again turned against them. Ascending a narrow ridge above 23,000 feet, their steps favored the steep slope on the left to avoid the overhanging cornice on the right and occasionally dislodged snowslides with their footfalls. One misstep on either side meant death.

  Then, at 23,458 feet, the fog became too thick to see ahead, sending them back to camp in the saddle. Storms kept them there for four days. On July 13, the duke sent three guides down for added supplies, and on July 17, he headed back up the ridge with three others, Joseph Petigax and Henri and Emil Brocherel. Again slowed by the heavy snow, they made it to 22,483 feet, where they spent the night in two small tents, setting a new record for the highest documented campsite.

  July 18 opened clear enough to start but with a light mist that grew steadily heavier. Visibility dropped as the duke and his team made their way along the knife’s edge between the cornice on the right and the sheer slope on the left. “The snow was very tiring, being over two feet deep, and the grade was steep. The foot went down so far at every step that one felt there was no solid ground beneath,” De Filippi reported from the duke’s account. “Nothing could be seen beyond a few yards, but they realized that bottomless gulfs opened on every side.”46

  After four hours in worsening conditions, they gained a rock outcropping they had measured at 24,278 feet from below. Climbing it with their hands and feet put them at 24,600 feet above sea level, a new world record, but still some 500 feet below the summit. “The fog became dense, the day hot, the snow bad,” the duke observed.47 A steeply rising, utterly unknown snow-covered ridge stretched into the mist ahead, with unseen drop-offs on either side. “It would have been madness to go on,” De Filippi declared.48

  They waited for two hours for the fog to clear, but it persisted. “Petigax wanted to continue,” the duke wrote, “but I thought it would be too risky to proceed under these conditions.”49 Knowing that his party must return to camp by nightfall, he sensibly ordered a retreat. “When this happens in the Alps, we can try again,” a commentator for Britain’s Alpine Club later noted; “in the Himalaya, we can’t.”50

  With the weather worsening and no relief in sight, 24,600 feet became the duke’s “pole by default,” and an admitted disappointment to him. Nevertheless, his altitude record held for thirteen years, until broken by British mountaineers George Mallory, Howard Somervell, and Edward Norton on Mount Everest in 1922. As in the response to Shackleton’s falling just short of reaching the South Pole earlier in 1909, however, near misses can become virtual achievements in the public mind. At the time, Shackleton and the duke received nearly as much acclaim for what they did as they most likely would have received for doing more. Not summiting on Chogolisa, the Alpine Journal declared, “was sheer bad luck.” First ascents are not the sole goal; it added, “Records do count for something.”51

  Beyond the record, the duke, Petigax, and the Brocherels showed what humans could do. Except for the fickleness of the weather, they would have summited on Chogolisa. Without supplementary oxygen or suffering any physical effects except loss of appetite, they spent a longer period at higher altitudes than any previous group.

  At the time, the American climber and physician William Workman posited that humans could not sleep at over 20,000 feet, yet the duke and his guides stayed ten days above that height and one night each above 21,000 and 22,000 feet, after which they climbed another 2,000 vertical feet, all in adverse conditions. “None of them had difficulty in breathing; there were no headaches, and their pulses were normal,” De Filippi reported. Even the Balti porters reached the highest camp at 22,483 feet, which De Filippi deemed “as especially worthy of remark.”52 Throughout this entire span, they had only one full day of fine weather. Further, the expedition remained for eight weeks at over 16,000 feet, with nearly three of these above 18,000 feet.

  At half past
three on the afternoon of July 18, 1909, in thick fog, the climbing party started down from its highest point to the Chogolisa saddle, where the others waited. On the morning of July 19, in a heavy snowstorm, the enlarged party began the descent to base camp on the Upper Baltoro. On the afternoon of July 20, in torrential rains, the full party commenced the three-day march from the Upper Baltoro camp to the expedition’s supply center at Urdukas on the Lower Baltoro, from where all headed home.

  After two months among the world’s highest glaciers and mountains in abominable weather, the Balti porters were overjoyed at the prospect of going home, De Filippi noted. “The rest of us were silent and depressed.”53

  Chapter 11

  Returnings

  REACHING THE UTTERMOST EDGES of the earth is only halfway home. One by one over the course of 1909, after they had gone as far as possible toward their poles, Mawson and David, Shackleton, Peary, the Duke of the Abruzzi, and those with them turned back. Some carried ample supplies; others had much less. Although they were crossing familiar territory, conditions changed with the seasons, and no one knew what to expect.

  HAVING ATTAINED THE SOUTH magnetic pole on January 16 after pushing far beyond their point of safe return with the supplies available, David, Mawson, and Mackay were the first to turn back and in the most hurry. In his narrative account, David called it an abrupt “right-about turn.”1 They did not even take time to confirm their location at the pole, and by this point were relying on Mawson’s projections of the probable position of a receding target. Growing increasingly desperate on the outward trek, they had left behind everything required for the return journey at drops along the way, and now needed to find them on the polar ice sheet.

  “It was a weary tramp back over the hard and high sastrugi,” David wrote in his first entry about the return trip, “and we were very thankful when at last we saw a small dark cone, which we knew was our tent, rising from above the distant snow ridges.”2 Covering 24 miles out and back on this critical day, the men reported sleeping soundly and with a certain satisfaction. The worst was yet to come.

  Two scientists and a physician, this party calculated and recalculated its odds and options. “At the Magnetic Pole,” David wrote, “we were fully 260 statute miles distant, as the skua flies, from our depot on the Drygalski Glacier,” where they hoped to meet the Nimrod.3 Of course, this was just their hope. No one knew if the Nimrod could make it back to the Antarctic in 1909, and if it did, whether its captain could find a small party at an undetermined location on an icebound, 200-mile-long seacoast.

  Heading now for the Drygalski depot, they were aiming to hit the coast roughly 150 miles north of the planned rendezvous at or near Marble Point, which lay directly across McMurdo Sound from the expedition’s winter quarters at Cape Royds. Shackleton’s year-old instructions to David simply said, “If by February 1 after the arrival of Nimrod, there is no evidence that your party has returned, the Nimrod will proceed north along the coast, keeping as close to the land as possible, on the look-out for a signal from you flashed by heliograph.” Shackleton only added this alternative pickup as “a safeguard in event of any accident.”4 These plans assumed that David’s party would be working in the Dry Valley near Marble Point by January. Yet David, with the off-and-on acquiescence of Mawson and Mackay but rarely with the support of both at once, fixed his party’s course for the pole at the expense of all else.

  By pushing the quest for the magnetic pole into January, contrary to Mackay’s advice, the team faced a desperate circumstance. They were now in a race to the coast against the Nimrod. Reaching their depot at the landward end of the Drygalski Ice Tongue, or barrier, by February would require them to average 16 miles per day on the return trip, which was more than they had covered any day on the outbound trek, and this presumed traveling without detours. The Nimrod might be late, which would extend the window for rescue, but they could no more count on this than be sure the ship would arrive at all. Mackay put their odds of getting back home at not more than 50 percent and had long since lost faith in David’s ability to lead.

  “The strain of the whole thing, the exhaustion and actual muscular pain, the cold, the want of food and sleep, the monotony, the anxiety as to what will happen in the end,” Mackay confessed in his diary, “make me think that this must be the most awful existence possible.”5

  The first thirteen days went as well as David and Mawson hoped and better than Mackay expected. Following their old track over the mostly level or lightly undulating ice sheet, the party maintained the necessary average of 16 miles per day, even though it often required sledging late into the evening. Some days the surface was soft and slow; some days crusted over; and some days so hard and icy that the men could not stand without wearing crampons. Most days, the temperature hovered around minus 20°F in the mornings and never broke zero, but at least the weather held and no blizzards struck.

  Mawson’s diary entries spoke of snow blindness, bruised legs, many falls, and frostbite. “In agony,” Mawson wrote on January 22. “Surface abominable,” he added on the 25th.6 One leg troubled him greatly.

  The scenery remained a 360-degree panorama of snow and sky until the coastal mountains came into view. Then the glacial surface began tilting away toward the coast, accented by occasional sharp drops. “Every now and then the sledge would take charge and rush down this marble staircase, bumping very heavily over the steps,” David noted on the 26th.7

  Three days later and still on schedule, the party reached its depot below Mount Larsen at the head of the steep glacier’s descent to the sea. Shortly after reaching the depot, with their load augmented by additional equipment and geological specimens, the men made a near-fatal mistake. Having failed to find a way up the main glacier’s snout on the outbound journey, they had gone around it by way of a side outlet that they called the Backstairs Passage. Mackay wanted to take this same route down, arguing that “the devil one knew was better than the devil one didn’t know.”8 He was right, but the others overruled him.

  With time running out, shorter and steeper should work going down, even if it failed going up, David and Mawson argued, and remembering how soggy and disrupted the ice-encrusted shoreline was in December, they dreaded how much worse it might be after two months of summer thaw. The Backstairs Passage angled northwest, away from their Drygalski depot, while the glacier’s main icefall pointed more directly toward it, or so David reasoned. By this stage of their long ordeal, trust had broken down completely between David and Mackay, with only the affable and imposing Mawson, who frequently talked with each man separately and criticized both of them privately in his diary, holding the party together. Nothing they had experienced to date prepared them for what followed.

  The glacier sloped ever more steeply downward as the party moved past the outlet passage. Staying to their right, near a granite cliff, the men avoided the worst of the crevasses and pressure ridges but faced the sharper slope. Twisting tarred rope around the runners to keep the sledge from running ahead, they slowly worked their way down to the coastal icefield. “Mawson’s leg was now so bad that it was only with considerable pain and difficulty that he could proceed,” David noted, “and both Mackay’s and my eyes were affected a good deal by snow-blindness and were painful.”9

  Upon reaching the base of the glacier, David reported, “We now found ourselves on an ice-surface quite unlike anything which we had hitherto experienced.” The ice had frozen in upturned tiles of varying sizes and thicknesses. “As we stepped forwards, our feet usually crashed through the ice tiles, and our legs were imbedded in the formation up to our knees,” he wrote. “Another moment one would find the tiles thick enough and strong enough to support one, but their surfaces being at an angle of 45° to the horizontal, our feet would slip down them sideways.”10 The upturned edges tore at the sledge’s runners. Having started the day at 9 A.M. but desperate to advance, they kept on through the midnight sun to 2 A.M., when they camped on a frozen lake.

  The men awoke on
January 31 to find 4 inches of fresh snow, making the tile ice tougher to navigate. Soon pressure ridges, crevasses, and meltwater canyons began intersecting the route toward the Drygalski depot, forcing them to climb across, hack through, or detour around obstacles. At the outset they relayed their load, tripling the distance, and at one point they carried it item by item over a steep pressure ridge. The depot stood less than 20 miles away, but progress toward it slowed to a crawl.

  Crossing a newly frozen lake, Mawson crashed through the ice, soaking himself to the waist. Everyone suffered physically and mentally, but David, who turned fifty-one on the 28th, struggled the most. Judged by his actions, Mawson observed, “He is apparently half demented.”11 Mackay called him a bloody fool for falling into a plainly visible crevasse and issued an ultimatum. Either David must voluntarily relinquish command of the expedition to Mawson, Mackay demanded, or he, as the party’s doctor, would declare David mentally unfit for command. Mawson was again left to mediate, but only managed to bide some time.

  “It was an awful day of despair, disappointment, hard travelling, agonizing walking—forever falling down crevasses,” Mawson noted in his diary.12 Frantic to reach the depot, the men sledged around the clock until collapsing in camp at 7 A.M. the following morning with roughly 16 miles still to go.

  The next two days were even worse. First, the men knew that it was now February and the ship could pass at any moment without their being in position to flag it down. (Although they could not know this, the Nimrod had successfully returned from New Zealand and was just then sailing slowly up the Victoria Land coast looking for them.) Second, the men awoke on February 1 to a blizzard that kept them in camp until afternoon and then limited their progress to a mile and a half before they gave up at 8 P.M. Looking back at their track a day later, David likened it to a corkscrew. Third, serving as cook for the week, Mackay reported that they had only “two day’s [sic] rations on very short allowance” left.13 Finally, with clear weather returning on February 2, after about 10 miles with all three men in harness and Mackay kicking David from behind to keep him moving, they ran into the deepest meltwater canyon yet, with sea ice at its base. Mawson called it an “arm of [the] sea.”14 Predictably, Mackay blamed their latest predicament on “our having approached the depôt on a wrong bearing” because of how they descended the glacier.15 In his eyes, David could do nothing right.